Blogs, Bandwidth and Banjos: Tightly knit bonds in weblogging.

Ben and I gave a talk at BlogTalk in Vienna on Tuesday. Unfortunately, because of jetlag and some bad timing, we weren't able to convey all the points we wanted to make in the talk itself. So, I'm posting a transcript of the speech we prepared.

I realize that we've never really communicated these messages. I feel strongly — and have always — that personal weblogs are often marginalized because of their presumed triviality. Weblogs are going to hit the mainstream and they're going to be a new method for communicating with small, intimate groups in a more optimized manner.

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Good morning. My name is Mena Trott and this is Ben Trott, my husband and co-founder of Six Apart, the company responsible for Movable Type, TrackBack TypePad and TypeKey. Since we first released Movable Type almost three years ago, the weblogging world has changed significantly. It seems that although millions of people are participating in weblogging, there are still common preconceptions about the purpose of weblogging.

While we're not here today to dismiss any form of weblogging, we are here to talk about how we see the medium evolving to reach an audience that's outside of this room...

We've seen webloggers and the media proclaim that weblogs would change the world, giving ordinary people the powere to bring politicians down. [Slides about Lott]

The first release of Movable Type almost coincided with the one-month anniversary of September 11th. From the time of our announcement about our soon-to-be released software to the actual launch, the weblogging landscape had already begun to change. Overnight, weblogs that were once about technology or daily minutiae, were suddenly dedicated solely to the attacks, to the politics behind the attacks, to the politics leading to the War and so on. People who never once wrote about government, religion or terrorism were suddenly transformed, and all of this was captured in daily, weekly and monthly archives.

Those writing these weblogs could be characterized as the pundits.

People have predicted that weblogs would also usurp traditional forms of journalism. Here, Kevin Sites, a journalist for NBC keeps a weblog about his time in Iraq.

Weblogs would also change the way we elect our leaders and parties. Politicians realized this past year that weblogs would be a crucial part of their campaigns. And, for those watching these campaigns, weblogging takes on an even more important role. [Slides about Presidential campaign]

On the other side of the spectrum were the more personal writers — what I'll call the diarists, the people who kept weblogs about their daily lives and were often characterized as online exhibitionists, people who didn't have any qualms about writing about intimate details of their love life, co-workers they hate or as many non-diarists jokingly stereotyped, their cats and the cheese sandwiches they ate for lunch.

Now in the middle, laid the egoists. And, I have to admit that is the camp I fell in. One day in March of 2001, during a period of certain disenchantment with my job and the direction of my life, I decided that I wanted to start a weblog. My rationale? I said "I'm never going to be famous in the real world, but, with a bit of creativity and humor, I could be pseudo-famous in the online world." This, of course, was during a time when one could easily name the most popular webloggers and they all happened to live in San Francisco or the Bay Area.

I decided that I wanted a readership of tens of thousands. I had a goal.

So, I started my weblog, and wrote the sort of posts that made me a popular read. I wrote about my life, but not about any sort of details that I wouldn't want my parents to read. I wrote with the clear understanding that Google and the WayBack Machine would hold me accountable for everything I said. I wrote responsibly and frequently and in little less than a year I had grown a readership of about 10,000-15,000 unique readers a day.

And now we reach the point in our talk where I explain the cryptic title of this keynote.

In July of 2002, during the height of my traffic I wrote a weblog entry about wanting to purchase a banjo. The punchline being that I don't know how to play any musical instruments and that it was the sort of purchase that characterized my impulsiveness. And, in this weblog entry, I painted Ben as this overbearing tyrant of a husband who controlled my life and finances and couldn't understand that I just needed a banjo.

I even made a cartoon hoping that it could finance the purchase of the banjo.

For those who knew me personally and those who had read my weblog since the beginning, the humor in this post was clear. Ben is as much an overbearing tyrant as I'm a professional banjo player.

Now, the thing about weblogs is that it's all about discovering new content serendipitously. From a link on a familiar weblog, you'll find a post on another weblog and you'll read it without much context about the author or the tone they take.

Humor is one of those tones that don't translate well on the Internet. That's why emoticons were invented. It's that smiley face that makes "I hate you" seem not so malevolent as "I hate you ? "

So, back to the banjo post. I wrote it, turned on comments and sat back expecting the usual accolades that made this egoist tick. But then something different happened. In my comments and in my email inbox I received a different sort of comment. The tone could be summed up by this comment:

"Being married is about respecting each other. If your husband won't let you spend your collective money on a purchase you want, you should consider if this is the sort of man you want to spend your life with. After all, how much does he spend on beer in the course of a year."

To which I responded. That's how much you know. Ben doesn't even drink beer.

My first instinct was humor. But as I sat looking at the similar sort of comments and emails I was receiving, I began to become extremely defensive on Ben's behalf. I was joking for goodness sake — my friends and family knew it and they loved the post. It was the first time that I felt that these strangers looking at my life through their own neurosis and projections were actually intruding.

Of course, I was the one who opened all the doors and curtains.

And so I reached a point where the literal bandwidth needed to serve out the pages to my readers had reached an all-time high while my personal bandwidth of willingness to share my life was plummeting.

Shortly after that post, I begin killing my blog slowly by posting less and less and revealing less and less about my life. Even though I had always filtered my weblog through the responsible lens of emotional and personal distance, I felt that almost every detail I shared would one day come back to bite me or be misconstrued by someone stumbling onto my site from Google.

So, you had the pundits, the diarists and the egoists. Now, I know that there are webloggers, perhaps some in this audience, who would claim that they don't fit in any of these groups. I'd venture to guess that unless you password protect your weblog or publish a weblog local to your own hard drive, you will most likely fall into one of these categories. Remember, punditry doesn't have to be about politics — you can also be a technology pundit.

I'd be the last person to want to say that webloggers have to be neatly categorized. In interviews, when we're asked about what weblogging is, we provide a simple straight-forward answer. A weblog is a frequently updated web site where the content is often in reverse chronological order. The tools that produce weblogs are easy to use and the output is easy to parse since the format of most weblogs is incredibly similar.

When we do mention certain types of webloggers - pundits, diarists or egoists, it is in the context of the talk that we are giving today.

Weblogging is moving into the mainstream and your friends and family — even the technically challenged who still joke that they can't make the 12:00 stop blinking on their VCRs — will be participating in some form or another, as reader or writer. The weblogs that they will read or write will be generations removed from those that shaped the medium — suck, links.net, Scripting News, kottke.org, Instapundit, Gawker, but they'll be ubiquitious and even easier to publish and read.

When we were designing TypePad, we had a specific audience in mind. TypePad was for the friends and families of those who used Movable Type. It was for those who didn't want to worry about installations, web hosts, template tags, plugins. Basically, for people who just wanted to communicate.

I use the word communicate because that's what weblogging is evolving into — there is a movement from publishing to communicating. And those who are communicating are wishing to communicate with much smaller audiences.

Remember my banjo story? Well, it took a couple years to realize that I didn't in fact want to write and reach tens of thousands. I wanted to reach 10 or 20 people, my close friends and family and a handful of webloggers I communicated with in real life (also known as friends).

I wanted to reach a smaller audience, an intimate audience. Clay Shirky gave a talk at the first Emerging Tech conference in California and explained that on LiveJournal, a diary/weblogging service that has a fairly young user base, the average number of friends a livejournaler has is about 6 to 12. This amazed us since we assumed, that their behaviour and linking patterns would be similar to webloggers. Blogrolls tend to be long and visitor traffic is coveted. Communication in groups of 6 or 12 is easy to maintain. These magic numbers work online and offline.

I'll assume that we're all in this room today because we care about the way weblogging will have an impact on our personal relationships, businesses or the world at large. Ben and I are here because we make two of the tools that allow people to publish and communicate. We're using the first-hand knowledge of our own experiences as well as that of our users to shape the direction of our software and services. We're studying the trends we're seeing with our users to speculate on how we should evolve the tools.

About three months after we released TypePad, I expressed my surprise that we didn't see more family or friend oriented sites through the recently updated list — for those unfamiliar with this, it's the list of weblogs that are being updated at a given time. What I didn't take in account is that I wouldn't be seeing these weblogs or photo albums in the recently updated list since these weblogs weren't for the world to see.

These weblog did in fact exist. However, they were private or password protected. Private meaning that they will not appear on the recently updated list, will not ping any services like weblogs.com, Technorati or blo.gs, or be spidered by search engines. In fact, 33% of our total weblogs fell in this private category. 10% of weblogs overall are password-protected.

These weblogs for family and friends exist, you just won't see them unless you're a family or friend of the weblogger.

While this is a new generation of webloggers, these are still early adopters. My mother and best friend have weblogs but are still petrified that their lives are going to be revealed online. They make me swear that no one other than I can read their weblogs; their weblogs are password protected. Even with these precautions, my involvement in weblogging has clouded their impression of what a weblog is.

My mother says she can't write a weblog because she's "not funny like me." She doesn't have any anecdotes or stories to tell; she can't write well. She has read my weblog for years and this has given her an impression of what a weblog has to be.

However, she has no problem sending me an email with the exact same content that could easily appear on a weblog.

She uses email to share photos with me, but email, as is becoming more evident every day, is broken. Half of the messages my best friend sends me — about her husband, her new house, her pregnancy — are tagged as junk, and I never see them. And when she wants to send a photo that she's sent me along to her mom, as well, she has to find the message in her email client and resend it — it would be much easier to be able to point her mom to her weblog.

And the best part is, the experience of reading a weblog doesn't have to be much different than reading email, if you or your family and friends don’t want it to be, with news aggregators like NewsGator and others. A company using Movable Type has set up weblogs for communicating in small work groups, and they have feeds for each of the weblogs that concerned parties can subscribe to. But they don't call them weblogs, and they don't call the feeds "feeds" — they set up Newsgator in the email clients of each of the office bigwigs, and they've told them that every day, they'll get a "special email" with updates on the project — automatically pulled from the weblog through a feed. No one realizes that they're reading a weblog, but they are — it's another method of communication. Like email, but better: more media-rich; more persistent; more flexible in privacy controls; more scalable in terms of personal bandwidth.

The most common insult towards personal weblogs are that they're all about what you ate for lunch, what you did over the weekend, etc. And to the vast majority of people, what I ate for lunch doesn't matter; but to a small select group of family and friends, they'll probably be interested in knowing that I had a really good dinner, or a really good lunch, or hearing about a trip I took. The personal weblog is content-driven, not audience-driven; it's not about trying to write content that pleases a mass audience — it's about finding an audience that wants to read what you write.

Of course, to make this possible, tools need to evolve. Many weblogging tools now provide mechanisms for password-protecting a weblog; but not that many allow you to assign a more granular level of control. But it's perfectly reasonable to think that you might have a weblog where you post both about the sandwich that you ate for lunch—a post intended for, and readable by, only a handful of people—and your thoughts on a new piece of technology from Apple, intended for a mass audience. These two pieces of content can and should co-exist, but one should be visible to a small audience, and the other to a large audience.

And just like that, the true "weblogging revolution" will occur when no one thinks of what they're doing as "weblogging." I'm writing anecdotes about my childhood; my mom is posting evidence of her daily search for cute dog photos; Ben is posting twice a year about TV shows; companies are tracking internal workgroup progress; we're all posting photos from our mobile phones; and so on.