I am still thinking about Dave Winer’s book, even though it’s none of my business. I wonder if there are models that suit a serious blogger’s writing methods and style to be discovered in the field of natural history. Chapters with small sub-chapters in a loose progression and grouped somewhat informally, each one focusing on one or two examples or anecdotes and a concept. In other words, not so different from blog posts but accumulating in a way that adds focus and energy. A little different energy from the blog because it does strive to be a book with a single focus and many related subtopics.

Why natural history? Because that field* works in part by accumulation of observations, I believe, as does blogging.

Some parts of DW’s written work fit natural history very well. Imagine 15 short entries about the life cycle of a tech project, say. A few entries about the early stages, a few about the relationship of the tech innovation to the marketplace and to users, a few about the maturation and old age of a tech innovation, a few about the natural enemies of tech innovation, one or two about the wider ecology that supports this innovation, one or two about what the innovation does to the wider social and economic ecology, etc. I know that DW has written about most of these things already or spoken about them in podcasts. Pull those already existing pieces out, arrange them in a progression, and see what examples and what parts of the life cycle of a tech innovation still need to be added to the story. You have a chapter or more underway.

Or take a post from last week, when DW said this:

On the net, your feed is you.

The links you push through this tool will be rendered in many different contexts. That’s why the way you render it is not important. The point of the tool is to connect your linkflow with all the places you might want your links to flow. That’s the reality in 2011, and any blogging tool must take this into account.

Today there are: feeds, rivers and renderers.

This all but sets out the organization for a progression of sub-sections of a chapter, written not so differently than blog entries, based on observations of the nature of the three creatures: feeds, rivers, and renderers. Maybe some of the sub-sections might address these parts of the wider topic:

Things meant to be read by humans. Things meant to be read by machines. Feeds as a hybrid of the two.

Feeds you own. When somebody else owns your feed. When you own your feed. To what degree you can really own your feed. Political implications of feed ownership. Economic implications of feed ownership. Social implications.

How machines read feeds and render them for human eyes. The important differences between various renderers and where they reside. Who creates and who owns the renderers? Why it matters.

Rivers. How they differ from other websites. What they require. What they offer. Why they matter.

Implicit in so much of DW’s work and in these topics is a question: What is the real creative opportunity of the web? [Though he is a technologist, DW plainly sees this as a blend of technological and social creativity.] Where and how is it misunderstood? Where and how is it threatened? How can it be protected? How can we take part in its best opportunities? There should be a chapter that directly discusses these things, but DW would probably not be able to discuss feeds and rivers and other topics without revealing this wider philosophy along the way, too.

_________

*”Traditional natural history, deriving from Pliny the Elder and Dioscorides, had flourished in the late Renaissance. It involved the mapping of nature through the classification of plants and animals and the assembling of information about their uses and habits. This traditional natural history continued throughout the 17th century and reached its zenith in the 18th century in the work of the likes of Carl Linnaeus.” (Peter Anstey)

I think novelist Alexander McCall Smith has invented a mini-essay form suitable for Twitter, and he has been publishing these little essays for some time. He launches a topic over a course of 3-6 tweets, all posted in the space of perhaps a half hour. Presumably he’s been gathering thoughts for awhile in preparation, since the tweets tend to show the topic from a variety of perspectives, as a good personal essay will often do. And a reader is tempted to see the tweets as having been arranged in a thoughtful order, making a progression, leading from an announcement of topic through some examples toward some kind of closure or conclusion. Here is an example, which should be read, in Twitter fashion, from the bottom up:

Is this a strong tweet?

@maddow: Brilliant visualization of a hard-to-grasp, important thing: http://is.gd/hX6sQd

Well, as a reader I have no idea what the link offers, and I resist that in a blog posting or a tweet. But if this next tweet’s link is correct…

The promise you make and keep: a brief theory of web publishing. http://is.gd/iiTBa9

…then a writer who makes a strong promise to an audience and delivers on that promise over time may not need to say more than @maddow has said here because readers know what they can expect from a trusted writer:

@maddow: Brilliant visualization of a hard-to-grasp, important thing: http://is.gd/hX6sQd

But a writer who is still shaping an identity or purpose or project will not have established a clear promise that an audience has heard and accepted, and for that audience a tweet like @maddow’s would probably be too skimpy, too much of a tease.

Of the ethical circumstance of people who create and sell tools in our digital age, Dave Winer says:

I always go with the philosophy that if you produce a tool that is good at reading or listening or watching that you almost have an ethical obligation to make that tool also capable of creating. [DaveCast, 6/22/11, 2:59-3:12]

On Twitter, novelist Alexander McCall Smith (@McCallSmith) reports briefly on a conversation about curated spaces with someone from the art world. First this:

Spoke to curator. He made interesting distinction between paintings in gallery (zoo) and those “in the wild” (eg. in churches, houses, etc.). [June 16 2011]

That caught my eye as a useful division for those interested in the role of curation on the web–our shared work of helping others find worthy content by establishing a meaningful context and then linking to it ourselves. Some public spaces in the world, belonging to institutions and dependent on their authority, protect and organize their collections just as zoos and galleries do. On the bright side, good things are preserved and studied and presented, while on the grim side all the fabled limitations of the ivory tower apply: out of touch with the world, shrouded in secrecy, expressed in the language of insiders, etc. Remember, too, how lions used to pace in small enclosures, their feline power driven to the edge of mental illness by their terrible circumstance. Those who study sometimes stifle the thing they seek to know. So “the wild” sounds appealing at the end of that little message. Three minutes later the novelist followed up with this:

Same distinction with men. Some are in the zoo (tamed, quiescent); others in the wild (go to pub, football, think unacceptable thoughts). [June 16 2011]

Here he amplifies the hints of the first message—the gallery or zoo protects but also tames; in the wild there is danger and disorder. It is, perhaps, the tug of civilization at every moment, between that which orders and the energies which it seeks to channel and contain.

I wonder if schools ever talk about adulthood as an opportunity to negotiate between the two very central human impulses. It’s plain that there is a toolkit for acts of curation in various fields, but is there something comparable that helps us benefit from the wild energy? Is there a toolkit, or are the wilds by their very nature beyond the reach of those organizing powers? I wonder if young people would enjoy talking about these two parts of our nature. I don’t recall much along those lines in my upbringing.

David Brooks on the way adulthood works: “Most successful young people don’t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life…. Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.”

I would engage much more deeply with our city paper’s website if 1) a long-time subscriber like me didn’t have to pay again to use the archive, which feels unfriendly to one’s best customers, and 2) the writers of the most thoughtful and well-written letters to the editor were given guest blog spots for a month or two, greatly extending the range of voices on the site.

Michiana Chronicles archive with 465 essays in full text and two years of audio.

WVPE Listener Commentary audio archive. [Or, at the WVPE home page: Click on Programs > Audio Archive]

Indiana Public Broadcasting Stations directory with links.

Six radio essays by Eileen Bender: Political Pin — Lame Duck Citizens — Fillibuster — Petition — Children’s Books — Inauguration Tales

Needed: a taxonomy of the many kinds of links that could then help us explore their differing value for users and their various roles in civic and other collaborative work.

For example, in his article on Matt Drudge’s linking skills, David Carr links to sites with a stake in the practice of linking rather than, say, to writers with ideas about how linking works. He uses the web’s linking power to point to examples, then, rather than to enter explicitly into a sort of a conversation, underway for several years, about his topic.

His article does link and does have a place in the useful history of writing about how linking works. But his own linking practice in this piece (possibly dictated by his employer, the NY Times) suggests, perhaps attracts or even helps to shape, an audience more likely to feel informed about the topic than to engage in its development. If so, then Carr’s links may quietly support the authority of the paper and neglect the collaborative possibilities that are already alive in the topic.

That’s a very quick example, I hope, of taxonomy at work: seeing the types, then considering the value of their differences. This is a small extension of yesterday’s posting on Carr’s piece. Earlier today on Twitter, @Chanders @harrisj and @markcoddington were stirring on this topic of linking.

Send them away, send them all away… The logic of sending people away from your site, as practiced by the Drudge Report.  David Carr explains their success this way:

A big part of the reason he is such an effective aggregator for both audiences and news sites is that he actually acts like one. Behemoth aggregators like Yahoo News and The Huffington Post have become more like fun houses that are easy to get into and tough to get out of. Most of the time, the summary of an article is all people want, and surfers don’t bother to click on the link. But on The Drudge Report, there is just a delicious but bare-bones headline, there for the clicking. It’s the opposite of sticky, which means his links actually kick up significant traffic for other sites.

I’ve lived the Drudge effect. Over a decade ago, I was working at Inside.com, a media news site, and wrote about a poll that had taken place on one of the presidential candidates’ planes that seemed to suggest a liberal bias among the campaign press. Mr. Drudge liked it, for obvious reasons. Our servers melted as we stood back in wonder, staring at what the linked economy meant and how one guy in a fedora seemed to know something we didn’t. He still does.

Via Jay Rosen, who is probably quoting his partner Dave Winer in this tweet: “People come back to places that send them away.”

In 2005, Winer wrote:

Now the fundamental law of the Internet seems to be the more you send them away the more they come back. It’s why link-filled blogs do better than introverts. It may seem counter-intuitive — it’s the new intuition, the new way of thinking. The Internet kicks your ass until you get it. It’s called linking and it works.

People come back to places that send them away. Memorize that one.

Winer also refers to this older formulation of the matter.

Carr’s article displays the sometimes not-very-ambitious approach to linking of some newspapers. The NY Times always links to other articles by the same author, no matter the topic, so that’s there at the start. But in the body of the article, we see five links to sites that have sought large audiences, such as the Washington Post–in other words, examples. But his article is about linking as a strategy, a topic that has been addressed for years in the blogosphere and elsewhere. No links to that region here, however. So the Times takes a pretty mechanical view of linking in this piece, linking to people and organizations, not to concepts in collaborative development. Yet isn’t the heart of the web not mechanical links to organizations but the movement of concepts to and fro? In other words, if you link to the wrong thing, the static thing, you prove that you’re not getting it. Not getting the living web.