Vox for the private, personal, and playful

Over the years of toyful blogging, I’ve resisted splitting the flow of this blog into separate blogs for the “personal”, other, and off-topic. Certainly, there has never been much more than a trickle to split, but it was also a sense that a percentage personal was an intrinsic and a goodness in this genre of conversational writing. However, it’s clear you shouldn’t let the air to fuel ratio get out of whack. Recently there’s been a knocking to the personal here, not suprisingly, given my recent combustions.

Never thought of myself, as exactly headed toward MySpace or LiveJournal, but in a fashion, perhaps the time has come for something like that. During this transition, a series of fortunate events, now see me with another blog, that hardly anybody can see, but it may yet poke out above waterline.

• I found myself writing, talking about what was up to many different people—friends, family, reconnected colleagues, new people fast becoming new friends. Lots of emails, fair amount of IM-ing telling bits and pieces of the story over and over, even as it was developing, eventually a notification email notifying hundreds in my address book … and so of course, this led to thoughts of how best to communicate about not just the personal, but in the full range of widely and narrowly, of openly and privately.

• I listened to a podcast capture of Anil Dash’s MeshForum talk in which he shares many observations from the LiveJournal experience. Much of what Anil observed about the contrast between the professional blogging of Typepad users and the social blogging of LiveJournal users really rang true to me … and was timely.

• Not long after, I got my requested invitation to the Vox preview, and in August I started an experiment by inviting a small set of my longest, close friends, all that go back before there was any professional or career to me. Almost all registered to read what I was writing, but none have posted. I started postings about family, a remodel, sharing the experience of the “squeezing through a straw” of this period. So far, mostly the kind of stuff that many people write in those annual letters they enclose in their holiday greeting cards, nothing deeply revealing, but tending toward the private.

Now I’m beginning to think that my Vox blog, though now all private, may indeed perhaps pull the mostly personal across and also create a space for the comfortably-shared off-topic and playful. Vox is now launched, and certainly, Mena and Ben are proud as they explain the vision of Vox. And David Hornik, is also proud as Sixapart funder and one who really does the professional/personal wavicle split blogging thing quite well.

And they all ought be proud. I’ll certainly raise my big thumbs-up to the long line of impressed. For the moment, I’ll just add two main points of feedback:

• Given the large ratio of readers to writers (even in this space of personal), private friends should be able to read my entry w/o registering. The Open Identity systems like in fact the OpenID system that has come out of the Sixapart people itself could/should be just the right mechanism for this. (Note a commenter on David Hornik’s post also makes this point.)

• I’m personally already wishing for a bit more control over privacy levels. Right now, you can post for family, friends, both, or public. And though the design point of Vox really demands absolute simplicity and it’d be to easy to suck here, the current switches feel big to me. Though it may take a few years for a signal from a broad and full user base, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it come quickly, given the great nuance most people do have on levels of how open or closed they are in different settings. With all the complaints about Email, many little things do work with it quite well, including the quite powerful and simple mechanism of allowing you to choose exactly the To, CC, and subtle BCC.

Technorati tracks 3 million blogs

1. On July 6, 2004, Technorati tracked its 3 millionth weblog.
2. 15,000 new weblogs each average weekday, one somewhere in the world every 5.8 seconds.
3. 45% of the weblogs tracked have not had a post in over 3 months 
4. over 275,000 individual posts every day, thus 3 blogs are updated every second.

Sifry comments were essentially the same that he made in a panel at the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit this last week

One of the things that drives me personally is that weblogs are turning us all into producers, creators, and participants in our society, not just consumers. ... A Forrester Research report asked Internet users which activities they were spending less time doing in order to spend time at their computers. 78% of the people polled said that they gave up television viewing. A study from The Georgia Institute of Technology's Graphic, Visualization and Usability Center showed a clear shift in media habits with more than one third of respondents saying that they "use the Web instead of watching TV on a daily basis."

Now for my Independence Day message: We're connecting with each other, we're talking to each other, finding people of similar interests, and we're having conversations. My dear hope is that this is the beginning of a rebirth of civics in America. Much in the same way that email revived the lost art of letter writing, Blogs are reviving the lost art of civilized civic dialogue - of argument, of well reasoned thought and response. And 3 million people (heck, even if you only assume that it is only 1.65 Million people, given the current abandonment rate) participating in worldwide civic discourse puts hope into my heart.

Blog Technologists Working Together

Many blog & RSS technologist/designers are working together to develop a new standard at a place, a Wiki being hosted by Sam Ruby, who works for IBM. Clearly that doesn't stop him from demonstrating a great deal of 4th Vertex skill.

The community is as the saying goes, planning the working, and working the plan all on the Wiki. Activity is orchestrated and the products of the effort are organized in an extremely lightweight way. A case in point, look at how they are deciding on what to call the standard, not Echo, not Atom, maybe Pie. Quickly reminds you of meetings, functional and dysfunctional aspects, but meetings with say eight people in them. Meanwhile this Wiki has probably 50 active participants, and maybe will have 100s if it keeps going.

Stay tuned for more discussion of the 4th Vertex, a concept that has been having me for the last few months.

The 4th Vertex is now explained in the July 2003 issue of Information Flow.

Blogs - How Many?

An article at Cyberatlas (a cousen of Jupiter Research) covers Blogging By The Numbers.

According to BlogCount, there are 2.4M-2.9M active blogs. This is based on reports of active blogs from three biggest blog hosters (Blogger, LiveJournal, & DiaryLand) and estimations based on other data points (e.g. Bloggers in Poland, RadioLand & MT estimates, etc.)

According to Jupiter, 2 percent of online world blogs, 4 percent reads the blogs. Interesting demographic contrast between readers and writers, writers relatively more men and higher income.

Impressions of Blogs Taking Off

Just over a year ago, I started to blog along with the monthly newsletter. As it's turned out, I didn't blog regularly, but I did leave some wannabe entries on my disk. Here's an entry I could have published in June 2002, so I'm ex-post-factoiding it now. It's mostly what would have been, just some copy-editing and gap filling.

Impressions of Blogs Taking Off
June 2002

The last six months, I've been watching the flurry of articles and Web-Buzz on the Blog phenomena. Though I've been partly sucked into the insider's well, still I feel, for lots of reasons, that the Blog phenomena is real. It's a trend, not a fashion.

A number of interesting facts make me feel it's a bit like 1993 or 1994 of the Web:

• Articles and Columns in New York Times, Washington Post, and other mainstream press.
• The word, "blog," gaining some acceptance, some concurrence in the community on its source, and OED looking at including it in their dictionary
• Two upcoming books ... how many more are to come later?
• Active exploration of the technologies, several technology companies, and missionary zeal evolving into a strong sense that some people are looking for business models and slightly little less open then typical of blogs

How will the trend of blogs develop?

There will be as much diversity in the use of blogs as there has been in the use of Websites, ... except there is something about voice over time that makes this a little different. The conceptual model of "fragments of articles" is different from "columns"

Why am I drawn to the blogging myself? It might get me to adopt a more regular pattern of writing. Something a lot of bloggers point out ... for example, Scott Lofteness ...

Just the possibility of audience helps you clarify your thoughts, actually burns out some of the solipsism.

And with some irony, let me add, I talk often as a way of working out ideas. If I wrote a lot more, I think I'd talk less, which some around me would appreciate. Many writers advise starting the day by doing your own work. I notice that I get awfully short emails from an acquaintenance who is an incredibly successful writer.

'arboring Star Tree of Blog World

I built a Star Tree of blog resources at the end of 2002. That mini-directory is somewhat out of date already; it's always real work to maintain a directory (or taxonomy or whatever else organizational resource). It seems with all the energy going into the blog world that somebody out there might be interested in partnering with me to publish out maps of content about Blogs.

Recent good reads on blogs

I surveyed a sample of Information Flow newsletter readers on their awareness of blogs. Many had heard of blogs before my running commentary, but many still appreciated the coverage. So some further pointers:

• A nice read for those in the business world that have so far seen blogging as something that happens after hours: Adapting Blog Technologies to Corporate e-Newsletters. This article nicely summarizes the hoopla and dissects blogs as a powerful new communication vehicle. Send to a marketing department, especially one that hasn't been touched by the Cluetrain.
  


• Steven Johnson, whose books I really like, has written a short article on blog space in Wired. The central point of the article is that blogs represent a way to access people rather than pages (i.e. documents or content). Yep. A blog provides a continuous window into a person's thoughts or life or whatever slice of such is revealed over time. For example, Johnson's own blog, which comments on the article, not only illustrates how an author's blog can be the site of fanship, but also a place or a connection point for further discussion with the author. Or even about the author or his thoughts (if you trust him enough).
  


• This point also applies to bookless bloggers who achieve authority or notoreity through regular and reputable blog writing. Peter Merholz, an effective blogger for years, stopped and restarted blogging. His re-entry entry, a couple of months ago, is a beautiful reflection on to blog or not to blog. (BTW, Peter is still credited, I think, with coining the word blog. The word has fans and enemies. I've gotten use to it and see the value in having a word other than weblog.)