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.

Podcasts Juxtaposed: Slouching Toward the Era of Quality of Life

Over the last year, I’ve been slouching toward working podcasts into workouts and commutes. Albeit sporadically, perhaps only 10 podcasts in the year. This last week, I listened to two excellent Podcasts during runs. Rather than separating them, connecting them seems a poetic resolution. The first, by the highly-attuned how-we-live observer Linda Stone, records her Etech talk in March, a continuation of her Supernova 2005 talk. Linda portrays the shift of how we focus our attention across 20 year eras:

… at the same time as we celebrate these powerful technologies [we have], we feel increasingly powerless in our lives. Which is why, just as we made a shift from productivity—all about me—self-expression in 1965-1985 to connect, connect, connect and the network as the center of gravity from 1985-2005, we are on the edge of the next shift. And a new set of opportunities.

Linda contrasts multitasking and continuous partial attention (an ungainly term, perhaps scanning would do) as the two prevailing modes of attention control of the last two eras. She also paints committed full focus attention as the mode for the next era. This last mode strikes me as what flow and being here have always been about, and so not so much a new mode, but perhaps a return to the old before the fragmentation and distribution of the modern age. In any case, most of us engage in all three modes at different times, though our ages and stages, roles and types, phases and eras do affect the exact mixture.

She sets up her close with a 1996 Dee Hock quote that beautifully infuses the hierarchy of Data, Information, Knowledge, Understanding, and Wisdom (see bottom of transcript). Linda sees this next era as being about the opportunity of moving from knowledge to understanding and wisdom, and our attention on improving the quality of life. The following statement from her Supernova talk bridges well to the second podcast.

We long for a quality of life that comes in meaningful connections to friends, colleagues, family that we experience with full-focus attention on relationships

Anil Dash’s MeshForum talk in May, available as an ITConversations podcast (Lazy Request: a transcript of this podcast) focuses on Blogging as a social experience true to the above quote and as distinct from Blogging as publishing for the people. The two forms of blogging are reflected in the data and analysis of the LiveJournal and TypePad communities.

• Maybe 10 percent of the people talking about a topic have the goal of talking to the whole world and of being a definitive resource in the topic area.

• Typepad started out with a ratio of 40 readers to 1 writer 3 years ago. Now, it’s closer to 1000 to 1.

• LiveJournal, formed in 1999, now with 10M users across 150 countries, several thousand more users than TypePad. It’s not just the diaries of teenage girls. Yes, mostly female, but mostly in the 18-24 range. The ratio of writers to readers has sustained at roughly 6 or 8 to 1, the highest common number roughly at 15 to 1 ratio.

• Anil commented people don’t organically have more than about 150 connections (Dunbar number). As he says, people can connect for lots of reason, business, political, so on, but nobody has 1000 friends.

The qualitative account highlights a number of other ways that the LiveJournal experience is not exactly as often cast. Though it has been enormously influential with its feature, it’s flying below the radar of both media and publishing-like bloggers, means it’s been left alone, un-messed-up to reflect a broader social reality. It’s been a haven for people to communicate privately with friends and families, and groups of people with common interests, where privacy allows creating a common context for communication.

Anil talks great sense about the contrast between what people actually write about, and say a thou-model of what is proper public writing. He points out that LiveJournal and MySpace often get denigrated, but these environments reflect what people care about. Gossip, for example, not about celebrities but the interpersonal news and real stories of friends. Anil commented that over 100k people check their LiveJournal page 4, 6, or more times a day reflecting their deep need for connecting.

One amusing comparision Anil makes is of LiveJournal to the public letters of the American Founding Fathers (hmm, this feels familiar). Apparantly, these Founders wrote much about politics, weather, and gossip, with the same spirit and understanding as blogging, as a record of my life in a public space. Point made, but it might not be such a good idea to push this analogy too far, since surely Founding Fathers would be much more concerned about their place in history i.e. their broad audiences in the future.

Publishing bloggers, even as they drop some formality, would tend to preserve a professional stance and focus on their subject matter, whereas social bloggers would be focused on experience sharing and thus more concerned about privacy and personal control. Some set of long-term bloggers that have sustained quality and versatility (Anil being a prime example) develop extremely nuanced blogging practices that travel the continuum between content and sociality, between sharing experience and sensemaking, linking and thinking, and so on. Anil has a nice explanation of why many such bloggers burn out on blogging, sign off, and eventually return. It’s partly about this missing safe space. Perhaps the better analogy to the Founding Fathers is this class of bloggers.

Anil’s contrast between publishing and social styles of blogging bridges nicely to Linda’s coming era. Though surely there is some me, me, me in the LiveJournal/MySpace/YouTube stories, perhaps as Anil substantiates, these social spaces really are about shifting from scanning for opportunities and connecting through the network to discerning opportunities and a focus on quality of life.

Miscellaneous:

• Perhaps my sporadic Podcast listening is cured. A big contributor, at least in theory, was a reluctance to fall into the iPod well and an ekeing it out with a high-friction Rio Nitrus and Windows clients. It’s working enough now, so we’ll see if it’s really about the high-friction life.

• The [MeshForum][http://www.meshforum.org] tagline of connecting networks connects nicely to another element of Linda’s shift from me and the rest of the world network to a more manageable life in a network of interconnected communities.

• Anil’s formal talk part is only 15 minutes of the 35 minute podcast. Wow, Kudos, especially since the rest is well-storied responses to interesting questions. A number of these are worth connecting or commenting on separately, … we’ll see if I get there.

• I think I’m safe in using first names, but I do wonder whether even as informal and social as this medium is supposed to be whether it reads wrong to some. If so, i offer reciprocity: use my first name. If you want retribution instead, go ahead and misspel or mis’ay my first name, I’m happy to let people buy the vowels.