Program Three : 19 Feb 2001

Guido: How are you gentlemen! All your base are belong to us!

Jocasta: Huh?

Guido: Err. Never mind. I'm just happy to be back, Jocasta.

Jocasta: So am I.

Guido: I'm a little amazed we made it to our third week.

Jocasta: You say that every time. I feel a sophomore slump coming on.

Guido: Yias. Not quite as fever pitch this week, but we've still got a few things to rattle on about, and of course we'll address some of those questions you good people keep sending in. Remember, we need more! More! MORE!

Jocasta: A little excited?

Guido: Perhaps.

Jocasta: Well, there haven't been any major dramas in weblogdom this week, however there have been a couple of interesting developments. One of practical use for all you egosurfers out there would be BlogFinder, which is a search engine that indexes weblogs and the like.

Guido: Hmm. So what does this do that say, the weblogs.com facility or even Google doesn't do?

Jocasta: It's hard to say, but we suggest that people who run a weblog go off and submit their details so it'll become more useful. If they index once a day that should be more than sufficient to cover most peoples needs, after all weblogs.com updates every hour, a task which must require some heavy duty bandwidth.

Guido: Well, it has been useful for doing an egosurf for ourselves and rooting out this rascal who reckons we had very little advice on weblogging in our first program.

Jocasta: Well, we received very few letters to answer that week. We may be geniuses, but we don't know what questions need to be answered until people send them in.

Guido: Getting a little tetchy?

Jocasta: Hell yeah.

Guido: OK. Well, there's a couple of other things to cover, but I think we'll have a look at our first question, from someone we've codenamed "Drongo". And it's a fairly pertinent point for a lot of people.

My dear Jocasta and Guido, I really need your advice.

I want to know if I should have a 'blog. All my friends have one, and even my daughter (sorta). Now, I'm usually the last person to jump onto bandwagons but ... well ... I really feel like I want a personal site.

As far as personal sites go, a 'blog is about the best form isn't it? I mean, it beats the hell out of "Welcome to my home page, this is my cat, check out these cool linkz!", right?

Please help.

Jocasta: Ahhh, the great question. Well, why not?

Guido: Indeed. It sounds like if he started one, he'd be doing it for the right reasons.

Jocasta: The right reasons being...

Guido: Well, personal expression, of course. It's been a fairly ; I think, some years back, when most people started a personal site, they would start with the basics as Drongo described, the generic welcome, the pet pictures, the cool links, perhaps expanding on their interests whether it be their favourite music, their car, or their macrame.

Jocasta: And then there was the fan site, where people would compile stuff about their favourite band or actor or sport. Some of them were crap, of course, but often you'd find some complete obsessive who put a lot of work into content for the site, which would often prove to be an absolutely brilliant resource for other fans.

Guido: And then they'd get cease and desist letters from some corporation who may have perceived someone infringing their copyright. And of course the official site would be really spartan and often beladen with bandwidth-heavy gimmicks.

Jocasta: Well, the more enlightened official sites usually link to fan sites. In fact you usually find the cooler the band, the cooler the site. For instance N*Sync's site is horrible. There were a few of these infringement cases that proved to be bad publicity for the company involved, and usually these days if some company or whatever wants to develop a following, they tend to encourage unofficial sites to spread word of mouth.

Guido: Well, it's an issue in the same sort of area as the instances around 97-98 when many companies carpetbagged their way onto the internet only to find some small fry had registered the domain they wanted to use. So they sicced the goons onto the poor sucker. But then were are also the opportunists who cottoned onto this and registered and squatted domains.

Jocasta: This is true. But now it's getting a bit silly. I know of quite a few cool domain names that have been taken up on spec and just been parked. But there's still plenty of un

Guido: Anyway, we're getting away from the point. I think a weblog is the perfect starting place for a personal site; from there you can build the rest of the site, and as you add other attractions you can publicize them on the blog portion, to work as a "Whats New" page. Plus you can do the journal thing, make a note of your responses to events and stuff, outline your interests, and generally have fun with the form. It's a versatile thing, and you do what you like with it.

Jocasta: I know some people get infuriated by "personal" stuff on blogs, but I like it, it tells me where the person's coming from. Well, as long as it isn't the usual high school obsessions. We've all been to high school, we all know it's hell, but geez, kids, it's only a small part of your life.

Guido: I like inner self/wider world weblogs too; often the events are defined by people's responses to them, and weblogs are a good way of showing that.

Jocasta: Of course, if you are starting a weblog, you have to set aside some amount of time every few days or so.

Guido: Well, as long as it doesn't ruin your life. It's sometimes sad when you read weblogs that have tons of entries but nothing about the persons life. If you can make it just part of your daily routine, without impacting on everything else you have to do, then it shouldn't be a problem.

Jocasta: Well, I don't many people watch TV as religiously as they did even a decade ago. And if it's just a case of transitioning from writing an offline journal or diary to an online, I guess you've got your time already allocated.

Guido: Also, people shouldn't be afraid not to blog on off days. If you feel you're forcing out substandard entries, if you're blogging because you feel you have to but don't really want to, it's become a chore and your lack of interest will show through in your words. It's fair enough to cater to an audience, but you don't have to be a slave to them; keep it interesting and they will come back, even if you skip a day or a week.

Jocasta: Another thing I like about weblogging, what you were alluding to earlier, is that the person, in making an active response to the world, becomes that much more a participant in it, rather that just casually taking it in as we've done with the television for decades.

Guido: Well, isn't that what people do over the water cooler or at the pub? Talking over the events of the day?

Jocasta: Of course! But this is also sort of expansive, as people do tend to discover other points of view that they mightn't come across at the workplace or the bar. Sometimes I find it quite amazing that though people might come from different backgrounds and locations, and disagree on topics trivial and profound, as long as they read the same language, they get to delve deeper into subject areas that might prove uncomfortable at a face-to-face level. And when you know where someone's coming from, when you walk in their shoes, you might start to understand their point of view, even if you don't necessarily agree with it.

Guido: So you're saying weblogs can bring world peace?

Jocasta: Err, I wouldn't draw that long a bow. But I have to say, they can certainly help.

Guido: Actually, I find it interesting that even though we've been aware of the a wider world than our neighbourhoods for at least the past century, courtesy of newspapers, the telegraph, cheap transportation, the telephone, radio of television, it's only with the advent of the internet that many-to-many communication has become practical. In a weird way, it's kind of like the world has become our neighbourhood. The ol' global village thing that scares the willies out of certain people.

Jocasta: You don't think that will cause the blurring of cultures to the point of where the process of cocacolonization is accelerated?

Guido: Ahh, well, it seems that as some people actively assimilate into some mythical corporatist world culture, others will actively accentuate the elements that make them different.

Jocasta: So some people want to be sheep, and others want to be birds of paradise?

Guido: Urrgh, that's a bad analogy. But it is a difficult question, actually, and a big one that many people are theorising and arguing about for yonks. I dare say we'll be getting stuck back into this at some stage, but for now my brain is hurting.

Jocasta: Fair enough. Anyway, I think we can agree that the weblog is pretty damned fine form of personal expression. Of course, the weblog form is just one of a myriad of ways one can express oneself on the web, and one project that attempts to highlight those sorts of sites is Soul Of The Web.

Guido: Oh yeah, I've seen a few of those doovy "SOUL" buttons here and there. I clicked it, it triggers up a popup window with five selections of a list of sites by individuals.

Jocasta: Why, you've been doing your homework, Guido. But yeah. We can blame Jim for this one.

Guido: I like the philosophy behind it.

Jocasta: Yeah. Lemme quote:
"Soul is breathed into the web by individual men and women creating their own individual sites.
Nestled into the corners and other hidden places, the web holds her treasures. Soul of the Web celebrates and introduces all of us to these sites. Places we might otherwise have missed. People we never would have met."

Guido: Aww, it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Jocasta: Err yes. Actually, it's interesting there's this return to individualism on the web. Would you say, that after the dot-com mania of the past few years, we've finally gotten back to a stage where it was... since the inception of the net, really, up until about 1997, where many of the sites had that individualistic or community feel?

Guido: Yeah, I would actually, though I would say that up until 1994 the web was largely an academic thing, just like the internet in general up until then.

Jocasta: Well, .edu sites aren't nearly as prominent now as they were in the early 90s.

Guido: But it's interesting. We're really starting to get a lot of people now who were around, perhaps experimenting at uni campuses and colleges, in those early years, and... are still around! Using their experience, both in the technical aspects and the societal aspects, and building on that. And they've basically spend so much time living with the net that it's no longer a novelty, no longer some high-tech equivalent of CB radio, that it's just part of everyday life. And I think it's just now, that things are going to get really interesting.

Jocasta: What effect do you think the dot-com rise and fall had?

Guido: Definitely a bonus, though I must say I'm glad everyone's gotten over the concept of making mountains of moolah out of it. It brought a lot of new people into the web, and even though some of them still have that leprous Canter & Siegel attitude towards the thing, many people are just doing their thing, keeping in touch with their friends and family, making new friends, forming relationships and all that, and, as Zeldman put it in the title of that book he's been writing, bringing their talent to the web.

Jocasta: You gotta feel for the people who've been getting laid off, though.

Guido: Well, certainly the ones who were working on good ideas that just didn't take with the market, or the ones who were adding to the web in cool ways, or the ones who just happened to be in the right place at the wrong time. But some were just acting like spoilt brats because they knew a bit of HTML and could bluff their way into jobs where they played Quake all day. I wonder how many companies failed because of that?

Jocasta: Erk, that's a bit harsh. I have to say, though that there's been one casualty that started in the era we've been discussing, being the Internet Underground Music Archive. Or IUMA, for short.

Guido: Yeah, it's a bugger, isn't it? I mean you'd think that having started in 1994, which was a bloody good time to start, you'd think they would've survived the Big Crunch, having such deep roots.

Jocasta: But it would've been MP3.com who sucked up the eyeballs in their field of concern.

Guido: Mmm, yes. I did feel a bit sad about that.

Jocasta: Well, that's bloody well it! We only answered one question this week, but boy did we flog the stuffing out of it.

Guido: We didn't exactly answer it properly, either.

Jocasta: We never do!

Guido: As it is, you too can have your questions answered less than satisfactorily in a long and meandering fashion! Drop them off at clinic@grudnuk.com, and we focus the vast pool of our intellect onto them.

Jocasta: And next week, we might even have some advice on weblogs!

Guido: You are on the way to destruction.

Jocasta: What you say?

Guido: You have no chance to survive make your time.

last week on weblog clinic :
The Requisite Inane Discussion About The Anti-Bloggies, David And Margaret For Weblogs, Giving Greymatter A Burl, Getting Those Punters Coming Back, Valentines Cards For The Cynical At Heart, and Kids Shows From The Beeb.