Six Apart News & Events: April 2007

If you’ve ever been listening to This American Life while in a car with a friend, you know the drill — you’re captivated by the stories of the lives of ordinary people, and it’s inevitably a jumping-off point for your own conversations. “Oh, that reminds me of the time…” and pretty soon Ira Glass has gotten you sharing a long-forgotten tale with your entire carpool.

That experience, of course, is just what we’ve found with Vox. The everyday moments from the lives of those we love, those whom we’re curious about, or even those we’ve never met serve as inspiration and motivation for sharing our own stories.

Every once in a while, a Question of the Day on Vox might resonate with your entire neighborhood, and there’s a sense that everyone’s on the same page, maybe even literally. That uncanny sense of shared experience is what Ira Glass and the This American Life team have excelled at capturing better than anyone else. It is, simply put, the most arresting example in today’s media of the power of individuals telling their personal stories in their own voices.

This American Life began, of course, as a radio show, one of the most distinctive and compelling ones on the air. And recently, when the show came to TV on Showtime, a whole new audience began to discover why the show is so widely acclaimed. Even the skeptics who thought such a distinctive radio show could never translate to the visual medium have been bowled over.

Which leaves only one piece of the puzzle missing: The community. Because American Life fans are nothing if not passionate, So today, we’re proud to point not just to the official This American Life blog on Vox, but to the brand-new This American Life group on Vox.

The creators of the Showtime series will be sharing insights into the show with the Vox community, but more importantly, they’ll be asking all of us on Vox to answer questions or respond to themes that are central to each week’s episode.

We’re excited to watch the community come to life — there’s finally a way for everyone in the American Life audience to participate in those conversations that spring up around the show.

Though Vox means different things to different people, “vox” is, of course, the Latin word for “voice”. What Ira Glass and the team behind This American Life have always done is let people with amazing, compelling stories share their voices with the world. Starting today, all of us on Vox can join This American Life in the conversation.

A few weeks ago, many of us on the Movable Type team got to meet with many of our most prominent members of the ProNet community, as well as a number of Movable Type users. The occasion was a two-day event, starting first with a Hackathon for MT plugin developers and geeks, followed by a more structured full-day Executive Summit, where the community discussed everything from best practices for a business blog to large-scale architecture issues to editorial concerns and even the future of the Movable Type platform.

For those of us at Six Apart, the events in New York City were exciting and energizing: Looking at some of the community writeups of the hackathon gives a great feel for the day; There were tons of plugins and little hacks created, but more importantly, there was the chance for many members of the community to meet each other face-to-face. (For some of us, we were putting faces to names we’d seen online for six or seven years!)

Plus, Dan brought cookies!

The Executive Summit the next day featured a full day’s worth of presentations, starting with Jay Allen outlining “how to build a plugin” first thing in the morning and lasting until Michael Sippey’s look at the enormous amount of energy and effort being put into the next major update to the Movable Type platform. In between, we heard lessons from experts like Adam Tinworth of RBI, David Jacobs of Apperceptive, and Matt Jaeger of Advance Internet. Though the videos are a bit rough, Maarten Schenk on our team, whom you might also know from Blogologie, has posted some low-res recordings of many of the day’s presentations.

We’re extremely grateful to all of you who took the time to travel to the events, from all around the country and even from around the world. There’s simply nothing as inspiring as seeing what amazing and unexpected things our community can create with the tools that we help build, and it’s a great motivator for the significant milestones we’re achieving with Movable Type in the next few weeks and months.

(Thanks to Elise Bauer and Dan Wolfgang for the photos.)

Harold Check is one of the quiet innovators of blogging, having started publishing his personal site Offhand Remarks ten years ago. In the interim, he’s contributed to dozens of blogs, most recently as part of our own team at Six Apart, shepherding some of our best blogs into existence, such as TypePad Featured Blogs and the TypePad Books blog and podcast series.

This week, as we’re taking a look at the first ten years of blogging culture, we’ve focused on technology pioneers like Dave Winer, individuals like Leslie Harpold who helped set the tone of the early blogging community, and experts like Michael Sippey who had recognized the opportunities around blogging in those early days. Today, we look at Harold’s role in helping see some of the first iterations of the complicated relationship between blogs and the larger media world.

• You first created Offhand Remarks ten years ago — what was the site, and what inspired it?

I was working in the editorial department at Yahoo in 1997. I definitely remember that the landscape was starting to change — websites were moving away from being reference material to being about ongoing observation and even performance. Something was coming together. It seemed like the ability to pump out simple pages quickly, whether by hand or using scripts and templates, was within reach to enough people to make it really interesting.

Like most of the folks in the “surfing department,” as it was then called, I was voraciously consuming the ever-increasing amount of media that the web had to offer. And part of me wanted to process it in real time with something more substantial than email. The culture at Yahoo at that point was: Find something interesting, forward it to a group or your coworkers. Maybe the whole department. Maybe just close friends. And, of course, there was a lot of “Seen it.” Publishing snippets of news or interesting sites to a page seemed like the perfect way to record the information, share with anyone who cared, and then move on. I remember reading Sippey’s Obvious Filter and just thinking this was the perfect medium. close to real-time, curated, yielding both raw information and a point of view.

Taking the tactic that imitation was a minimally acceptable form of flattery, I started my own filter blog and called it “Offhand Remarks.” It lasted for about 4 months in its original form. I realized relatively quickly how taxing that kind of “always on” editorial schedule ultimately is. That’s just one reason I’m in awe of people like Jason Kottke who seem to have found an incredibly high level of output that they’re able to sustain.

Working on Offhand Remarks, even using simple perl cgi’s to iterate the page, it was easy to see that burnout was just a matter of time. I decided to turn my full attention of my other project — Media Nugget of the Day — which was a group site dedicated to sharing one good thing per day. I found that pace, and working with a group rather than on my own, was a lot more sustainable. Of course, that’s all relative. The Media Nugget lasted for about 700 entries, but ultimately even that site ended up in limbo. Someday soon, I hope to revive it, reinvent it, and see it thrive, but only time will tell.

• Paul Bausch (co-creator of Blogger, whom we interviewed a few years ago for this blog) recently said that your site helped influence him to create his first blog. Rogers Cadenhead (well-known Blogger and author of Movable Type Bible Desktop Edition) recently said the same thing. What’s it like to influence others who’ve gone on to find success through blogging?

It’s really nice to hear that people remember Offhand at all, since my tenure as a diligent blogger was so incredibly brief. Of course, it was easy to see that this medium was going to take off — especially as the tools reduced the overhead required. Part of me desperately wishes that I could have stuck it out until innovations like permalinks, comments, and trackbacks ushered in the fully realized conversational era of blogs. I think it would have been great to have made deeper connections with other writers on the actual sites we were running. That said, I’m really lucky that living in the Bay Area and working in tech allowed me opportunity to meet my online heroes — Bausch, Haughey, Kottke, Sippey, the Trotts — and even work with some of them. There are plenty more that I haven’t met, even now, and I still want to. I’m a fanboy myself.

• How come you’ve got HaroldCheck.com and Media Nugget — isn’t one blog enough?

One blog is never enough. There, I said it. Between work and personal life, I contribute to close to a dozen blogs. And there are always a couple more I want to start at any given time. I honestly don’t see how anyone can get everything down in one place. Maybe I’m a bit scattered. I prefer to think of it as enthusiastic and eclectic.

Seriously though, I think dedicating a blog to a specific subject is usually the best approach. It lets you go deeper when you’re not worried about modulating content and keeping everything balanced. I’m a big fan of the blogging networks that have cropped up in the last 5 years: The -ists, Gawker media, Weblogs Inc., Shiny — I think their strategy of creating niches and really exploring them fully is what makes a lot of their blogs really excellent.

I like to think I was around when the first subject-based network was started. In 1997, there were two employees working on Yahoo! Full Coverage (then quaintly called “Current Events” — I pitched the name “Yahoo! News Octopus,” but somehow that didn’t make the cut). It was basically was a set of pages dedicated to both long-running and short-term news stories. Each was created by hand, updated every 15 minutes, published in reverse chronological order, drawn from resources around the world, and archived for permanent reference. When blogs first started to be recognized as a breakout form of media, I remember thinking of those two surfers — and later the entire team of 10 or more — who basically spent all day blogging. I certainly think they were the first people whose entire job was to share links about specific subjects. Yahoo’s mission didn’t call for them to add any personal commentary to the links, so they were filter-bloggers by design, but I know how hard they worked to provide a even-handed, global point of view. Proto-bloggers, I salute you, wherever you are. I bet you’re glad you aren’t still adding stories to the Middle East Conflict page…

• You helped us launch TypePad Featured Blogs, and have overseen a new feature every day for almost a year now, along with countless other blog posts on the dozens of blogs that we maintain as a company — how is it different blogging as part of your career as opposed to as a labor of love?

I’ve been really lucky to be able to work for companies where the needs of the business align really closely to my own passions and interests. And I don’t mean lucky in the sense that it was random. I sought out endeavors that I could support wholly and openly and enthusiastically without having to adopt some kind of pose. Actually, the very best thing about blogging as part of your career is that you have a heightened sense of responsibility to meet deadlines and keep publishing at a regular pace. It’s not just your readers and customers that are counting on you, it’s also your colleagues. I like that pressure. As a fundamentally lazy person, I require that pressure.

• What’s surprised you the most about social media and how it’s evolved over the past 10 years?

It’s interesting to me how fractured the landscape of the social media remains. Of course, I’m very happy that we aren’t all using one small set of applications to tell our stories (WordStar Blogging Edition 4000), but I sometimes worry that some really life-changing modes of communication could be getting lost in the jumble. As someone who likes to think of himself as, still, a voracious consumer of new services and innovative tools, even I find it really tough to maintain a clear view of the emerging trends and ultimately suggest good choices for the people close to me who rely on my curiosity to inform them. Of course, that said, I still love trying to keep up.

The other thing that continues to surprise and delight me are the staggeringly generous personalities that emerge online. This past year, I was incredibly energized by Ze Frank’s The Show. Just watching him encourage and amplify the creativity of his community was awe-inspiring. Yet, while I was watching Ze produce great piece after great piece, I realized that he was exceptional, but not alone. There are a lot of truly creative people putting out their own media right now. To me, 2007 reminds me a lot of 1997, like the tools are making everything easier, the pioneers have blazed a trail, and now it’s time for the rest of us to step up to the mic, or the blog, or the video camera. Take your pick.

Many people in the Six Apart community know Michael Sippey from his work as our VP of Products — when you see something like Amazon’s new widgets for TypePad, it’s Michael’s tireless advocacy and leadership that makes those sorts of features happen. But unless you’ve been watching the social web for a long time, you might not know that Michael’s sites like Stating The Obvious helped influence some of the fundamental thinking about blogging. We’re lucky enough to get to work with Michael, so we stole some of his time to ask a few questions.

• First, how did you get started writing Stating the Obvious? What were your influences?

You expect me to remember that far back? Sheesh, Anil. Well, in the early ’90s I was working for Advent Software in San Francisco, and in my spare time would use the PC and modem I had there to connect up to The Well. I was your classic Well lurker: not having been a BBS kid, I was fascinated by the social dynamics and the community that was being built there. Around that time that Wired launched; the first couple of years of that magazine had a big impact on me. As an English Lit major in undergrad, I guess it was inevitable that all that reading turned into writing; I sent a few emails around to unsuspecting friends in the early summer of 1995, and decided to find a web home for it in August.

• StO has a long-form essay format, as did many sites of that era, such as the sites by Dave Winer and Leslie Harpold that we talked about earlier this week. But today almost nobody regularly publishes longer essays online on personal sites. How did you start doing a shorter link/filter blog?

You know, I kind of miss the long-form essay format. I used it to work out what I actually thought about a particular topic, and I’d draft a piece over the course of the week for posting on Mondays. I’d love to find that rhythm again. Sometime in ‘98 I started running “Filtered for Purity,” which was essentially a link blog on the front page of the site. As new ones were posted, old ones would disappear. Since Ben and Mena were still years away from shipping Movable Type, and not being a programmer myself, I didn’t have tools to automatically archive those links. So now I can just claim that the lack of permanent homes for those Filtered entries was “by design.”

• It was five years ago that you and I were first talking about “Stories and Tools” — the idea that we’d have to adapt the document-centric nature of the web to support richer applications. And Jesse James Garrett kind of neatly encapsulated this idea in his Ajax essay. Did you think five or ten years ago that we would be where we are today?

I had no idea we’d end up here. Hoped, sure. What’s amazing is how quickly it all happened. When my parents came online their whole experience was through the AOL client. I told my Dad, who called it “Americans Online,” that he would be off that service and connecting directly within five years. It took three. And now they’re both sending me private messages on Vox.

I wrote a toss-off piece in 1995 called “The Three C’s of Computing,” which argued that these tools (connected PCs) are good for Creating, Consuming and Connecting. At the time we had OK tools for creation (think MS Office), a growing set of tools for consumption (think AOL), and a very nascent set of connection that wasn’t being covered by the mainstream press (boards, listservs, USENET, etc.). I wrote back then that the dream would be combining the three “into one, glorious future: creating, consuming and connecting all at once.” I think we’re starting to realize that dream with blogs, social networks, photo sharing, presence broadcasting, etc.

• What do you think are the big-picture trends for technologies like blogging? Is blogging a solved problem, like email, or are there more big leaps to be made?

Blogging is definitely not a solved problem. Go back to the three C’s. We’re getting to the point where normal people can start to use the “creation” tools…but we still have a long way to go to make it easier. If today’s RSS reading experience is the end of the line for “consumption” then someone should take our industry out back for a beating. And “connecting” is only starting to get interesting — every application is becoming social, and as a industry we’ll find more interesting ways to traverse and use the network graphs. Then take all of that and tear it away from the desktop. Here in the US we’re still remarkably PC-centric; the mobile and ambient modes have yet to be leveraged effectively. (Look, I used the words “leveraged” and “ambient” in the same sentence. Drink!)

• You influenced a lot of us, myself included, to start blogging and to really invest our lives and careers in helping this medium grow. What are some of the sites that have inspired you along the way? What sites do you love reading today?

Oh, great — so you’ll blame me when this is all over with? I guess that’s OK, because I blame Carl Steadman. From Rats to Cats to Kid A in Alphabet Land to Suck.com to 99 Secrets to Diana Bear to Placing to his backpage column in The Industry Standard, Carl was waaaaay before his time. IMHO (as the kids say), this is all his fault.

And lately? Well, lately I’m really inspired by this guy Anil…oh, wait. Never mind.

• What are you looking at next? What excites you right now?

What excites me right now is the idea of applying all of this bleeding edge tech to the real world, to people who don’t live within 100 miles of Silicon Valley or Silicon Alley. (Do they still call it that?) Bringing things like privacy and presence and syndication to people who don’t even care to know what all of it means, they just want to connect with their friends or run their business.

Thank you to Michael for taking the time to offer his perspective on the history of blogging. You can always keep up with Michael’s latest thoughts on his blog at sippey.typepad.com. This post is part of our ongoing series of posts about weblog history and its pioneers as the medium reaches its tenth year — earlier posts highlighted Leslie Harpold and Dave Winer.

If you didn’t know her work, you might fear that someone who owned the domain names fearless.net and smug.com might be a bit, well… prickly. But more than 10 years after Leslie Harpold helped start some of the most clever and intelligent personal sites on the web, and just a few short months after her untimely passing, the lasting impression of Leslie’s life, on and off the web, is of surpassing kindness. And as we look at 10 years of blogging culture this week, her impact and legacy in the world of blogging is well worth revisiting.

The sites that Leslie helped create are legion. There’s The Historical Present, her blog. And Harpold.com (formerly Hoopla.com), which acts as something of a gateway to the rest of Leslie’s legacy on the web. The Smug archives still bear witness to the early experiments in design and writing which Leslie shared with us all. And each year, Leslie shared with us her Advent Calendars, (see 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005) making explicit her desire to give a gift to the entire web.

We said yesterday that “fundamental generosity is a key trait of all of the innovators in blogging” and it’s never more true than with Leslie Harpold’s legacy, as is evident from the loving tributes to her life that were shared late last year.

The MetaFilter community offered a wide range of observances, which were echoed all over the web, especially by Leslie’s friends like Shauna Wright, Lance Arthur, Paul Ford and scores more remembrances captured by Kevin Fanning.

But if you look at Jeffrey Zeldman’s 1998 interview with Leslie, you get a good understanding of why she was so influential. She was talking about Smug, but it could have been about any of her works:

I went looking for something on the web that was about media, culture, didn’t pander to the reader, but wasn’t arrogant either. Something funny, that spoke to me as someone who had a life online and off. I couldn’t find it, so I made it.

And all of these creative works, including her own blog, were created after Leslie had penned one of the earliest critical pieces about blogging. (“An unlikely candidate for IPO fever, Web Logs do help highlight nichey obsessives, and don’t help product move off the shelves. You’re not going to get rich, famous or thinner. I advise that you channel your energy into thinking of something interesting all your own. Originality is indeed rewarded in an emerging medium.”)

That healthy skepticism helped Leslie focus not on technology or the bits and bytes, but on the generosity that ties together so many communities in blogging. For all her pioneering work done with various types of content, there’s perhaps one lasting contribution to blogging culture that we can attribute the most to Leslie Harpold: It’s okay to be as generous and giving to the people whom you meet with and connect with online as we are to the people we care about face-to-face

Though it seems obvious in retrospect, sharing kindness and even, yes, love with the people we meet through our websites was a leap of faith that wasn’t obvious at the time, and for that reason it’s well worth highlighting the unique role that Leslie Harpold has played in the history of social media. While everyone has said that she’ll be missed, the happy news is that her works online are still out there, waiting to be discovered again, or if you’re very lucky, to be read for the very first time.

Yesterday, Dave Winer celebrated the 10th anniversary of Scripting News, his seminal and enormously influential blog at scripting.com. Dave co-created or popularized of a broad range of blogging technologies — from RSS to podcasting to blogging itself.

So this week, in honor of Dave’s milestone, we’re going to talk about some of the people who’ve been tinkering with blogging and personal social media for a decade. We invite you to think back to 1997, as many of these seminal sites were just getting started, and try to imagine the breadth of changes they brought to the web in the years that followed. In fact, in just the few years after the founding of sites like Scripting News, blogging had gone from an unnamed or even nebulous concept to helping form a nascent community and then to becoming fundamental evolution of the social web. This was solidified by the coining of the word “blog” in 1999.

To tell the truth, at Six Apart, we’re not so interested in the debate over who defines the word “blog” or “weblog”, who came first, or which stuff someone should or shouldn’t get credit for; the bottom line is, blogging as it exists today, and many of the technologies that make both blogging and our company Six Apart possible, wouldn’t be as popular as they are today without the influence of pioneers like Dave Winer. And back when there were only a few dozen bloggers in the world, each one of these voices had an even more powerful impact; The blogosphere was so small back then that it was often possible to talk to nearly everyone involved. It’s a period in our own medium’s history which is well worth revisiting.

As Mena pointed out a few years ago, we are excited to recognize the innovators and inventors whom we’ve been influenced by, and we’re proud that many of them have reciprocated by supporting our efforts. For example, at a seminal point in our own company’s history, Dave offered his perspective on business models for developing software, informed by decades in the software industry and at the center of online communities.

Now, you can’t pay fair tribute to Dave Winer without conceding that he’s stepped on some toes along the way. (We suspect he might even take some delight in noting that himself.) But here’s the thing: Dave ships software like crazy. He thinks of ideas, builds them out, and gets them in front of real (albeit geeky) users, sometimes all in the same day. For every time he’s pissed somebody off, there are just as many times when Dave’s been generous with not just his ideas, but his implementations. That fundamental generosity is a key trait of all of the innovators in blogging.

For ten years now, Dave has been guiding us to the links he feels are most important, punctuating that narration with essay-length thoughts on everything from politics to technology to media. Scripting News has everything you could look for in a blog, delivered with inimitable personality. And it’s an extraordinarily appropriate blog to start with as we look at where blogs have been, and where they’re going next.

We owe a big thank you to Dave Winer for all his work in influencing the rise of blogging, but also for helping create a milestone for us to use as a starting point for a conversation. And as Dave himself might say, “Keep digging!”

(Thanks to Dan Bricklin for the image used above.)