When a blogger grows up : What software and art have taught me about the state of the liberal blogosphere

Back in 2000, when I was still pregnant with my little one, I asked the father of my children if he could build a system that could make it easy for writers and artists alike to publish on the net. Not a Dreamweaver, which was all the rage at the time but something better than the hideously looking thing made by that little company called Pyra ... what was it named? ... Ah ... hmmm .... Blogger?

Heh.

The father of my children decided that art and not business was his thing and so he said no thanks. A bigger woman would have divorced his ass on an instant for I knew this was something that was going to be big. But, not only I was not only fresh from pushing out almost 10 pounds of kid through my loins; but September 11, 2001 overwhelmed all our calendars while post-partum depression and everyday angst overwhelmed my life.

I've seen many trends develop before they became hits an, quite frankly, it's a bit frustrating to forsee the next wave but not have the resources to put into action "the vision". It would take me almost 2 years to find something akin to what I was looking for and yet, not quite.

First it was Greymatter which I found much too ugly. Then I moved on to Bloxsom, which I found much to sparse. Then it was b2 and I for a moment I thought, "Yes! This is it". b2 was abandoned by its developer and it unfortunately would not materialize into WordPress and b2evolution until 2 years later. And so it was that I found myself at the doorsteps of MovableType.

Notwithstanding my criticisms of Six Apart during the Great Blogtercation of 2004, I said many times and will go on record here as saying that Ben and Mena Trott created the standard by which not only all micro-content management systems should be measured.

Movable Type is a thing of beauty because it has always had the end-user as its first priority. Design and usability go hand-in-hand in the software. It was not just the entry forms that made it easy to use. It was those early cascading style sheets Mena created that became the visual language of blogs. I guess it takes a good knitter to understand the importance of a good pattern and that is what those templates are. They were not meant to be the norm; the only way to look at the blog but the jumping board to their endless possibilities in design and use. So whether it is the Washington Post blogs or the Buddha-like challenge of the CSS Zen Garden, Movable Type proved you did not have to have one way to use this new media technology.

With that in mind though, it is not an easy software to install. I just tried to no avail to install the software on my new server. I am stuck now with static webpages for this site while I try to get someone to install the damn thing. These are not a new complaint, by the way. My grumblings on this aspect of the software go back to 2002.

That's why, when TypePad came into the scene I jumped at the opportunity to try it. And by blog, they got it right with that one. I even had a now defunct blog called TypePadistas, which was an attempt at tracking all the interesting stuff being created with the product. TypePad is what Blogger was not until Doug Bowman got his hands on it and redesign it to its present glory. (Yeah, I do have a Blogger account and it is a beautiful thing to use these days.)

I am a control freak though, and when the licensing changes came with MovableType 3.0, I decided that la negra was happiest having access to her server and being able to mod her entry templates, add plug-ins at will and do whatever the hell at TypePad she could not. So I closed my TypePad account with a sigh of despair because, truly, their CSS interface is probably the one thing that I miss the most. And I really did not get into the moblogging features they've so revolutionarily introduced into the blogging landscape. I mean, really, moblogging would had not exploded had it not been for TypePad.

The question is, why change? Why go with something different now?

Well, although I had been in a quest for easy-to-use publishing tools (after the MT licensing changes, I tinkered with WordPress, b2evolution and Textpattern; what I was really out for was a platform that could be flexible enought to allow the organic growth of a one-woman show into a cooperative and collaborative matrix.

Back in 2004 I started to look at wikis, not just after the success of Wikipedia, but really after the spectacular success and evolution of early collaborative net art pieces created by my husband, Mark Napier; in particular Digital Landfill, ©Bots and the Guggenheim commissioned net.flag.

net.flag in a way works like a wiki and a blog. It asks the question : What would the flag of the internet look like? That single question, is like a blog post: It's a creative matrix. Over ten thousand flags later, you can say that it's the flags as response and comments to the original question that make the artwork what it is. In this sense it works like a wiki because it is the cumulative work and the anonymity that maintains the site as its own self.

But the tension in these pieces is the very fact of their authorship. What is the work of art, the software or the flags created by users? Are they two instances of creativity to be judged separately or is everything, the software and the archives, one work of art.

That's why what is most interesting is to see how in these net art pieces, users try to bust out of the work as individuals by creating a visual idiom; a sort of personal deictics. People like to collaborate but they also like to be recognized as part of a collaboration. They stand and are counted because that indicates where they are, why they are there and how pertinent their presence is to the success or relevance of the project. A user is not just a user in these pieces; they are collaborators as well.

One could say the same of the commenters on blogs. But does this collaboration make a community?

Way before Red State or DailyKos, there was Kuro5hin, Slashdot, Metafilter. Community blogs have always been around since forever. Does anybody remember the glorious craziness of Suck.com or the artistic clusterfucking of a site like Hell.com.

Just thinking about these sites makes me feel old.

But I am bothered by 2 things in all these sites : How popularity (by rating up) and control (by troll rating or banning) have been the only measures of success on these sites.

Blogs are fantastic star makers and this is inherently a problem. To those of us who spent years reading and studying Marxist philosophy and looking into the possibilities of its applications from anarco-syndicalist unions to Liberation Theology communes; a system where hoarding of value through hierarchical or class structures is an inherently exploitative system --and it is one primed for utter corruption and not just of the astroturfing kind.

When you have a system that is meant to be used by people to extract wealth and value from others to get ahead, how much time do you really have to create a progressive and cooperative community committed to change? Why would you want change once you are on top? Because, repeat after me, comments on a blog do not a cooperative community make, nor a few links make for a networked ecology. They are important but not just the only things that count.

This is one of the major criticisms many technologists have had of the google juice circle jerk that is Top 100 list of Technorati. Many of the blogs on that list are owned by people who have been connected not by popularity but friendship. Bloglines, one of the perpetuators of the list was founded by Mark Fletcher who in many an interview has said he created the software (and then the service) to keep up with his own list of recommended readings which was basically a list of his friends and colleagues. Of course, this list became the most read of Bloglines. And once that list was forged, it was replicated endlessly in other blog tracking services.

This is how the value of a blog was developed. It started with the technologists. The liberal punditocracy of the blogosphere is heading exactly that way but what was good for the geeks is not necessarily good for the nerds. Why? Because, at least in theory, the nerds are creating a more egalitarian and democratic socio-political infrastructure with the use of these emerging publishing and networking technologies.

So this whole idea that popularity is the measure of effectiveness, reach and influence is a fallacy. A dangerously deluding one, especially when it comes to politics.

Mary Hodder has done some serious thinking and development of the subject having been one of the developers of Technorati. In her kick-ass musings about the subject, Link Love Lost or How Social Gestures within Topic Groups are More Interesting Than Link Counts she identifies 25 of what she calls social gestures that could truly establish the value, influence and reach of a blog but are often not used by blog ranking engines because, as she has deftly put it :

To automate this process, or create a score, is to judge the stone by the ripples in the pond. Right now, the Technorati Top 100 list is obtuse enough that we can all agree that it's not useful for judging 14 million blogs, because blogs are as different as their authors and those who would make a link rank for a person in one's topic community. As for lists of bloggers based on the number of subscribers, like the Feedster Top 100, we know that in this instance, the list is a count only those users of Feedster, so it reflects a small percentage of overall readers.

So I hear people dismiss the current indexes all the time. By doing so, we let the opacity of inbound links counts be a barrier to rankism or scoring that we don't really want to make more precise. The obtuseness is useful because it's can't be relied upon, and therefore the confusion as to the value of a blog is left to be determined by readers through their own methods, by those who look on their own for the ripples across blogs, combined with some reading of the blogs. And this may make many people happy. For me, I would rather have people do their own assessment of my blog because they read it or participate in discussions I am in, seeing what the activity is around it, to judge it, verses relying on a score or count of inbound links.

However, I'm beginning to see many reports prepared by PR people, communications consultants etc. that make assessments of 'influential bloggers' for particular clients. These reports 'score' bloggers by some random number based on something: maybe inbound links or the number of bloglines subscribers or some such single figure called out next to each blog's name. The bloglines measure in particular is not a great one on it's own, because RSS aggregator users are reported to be only approximately 20% of the blog readers, though I believe it's really half that, because my own user studies show that many who are asked if they use an RSS aggregator say yes, when in fact they don't know what it is (they just think they should know, so they answer yes to the question of whether they are users). And of those RSS aggregator users (I think it's 10% of blog readers), and of those, 50% supposedly use Bloglines. But my own assessment of Bloglines is that maybe 60% of their accounts are probably used regularly (not abandoned or very rarely checked), so if they have 35% of the RSS reader market, a Bloglines score might only reflects 3.5% of the total blog reading market -- a very low sample to judge the readership of a blog generally. Using the Bloglines count only counts users of that aggregation service. As a point of comparison, Bloglines shows 20k subscribers of BoingBoing, but Feedburner has 1.2 million subscribers to the BoingBoing feed itself, because they produce the feed, though those counts are only discoverable to the blog owner currently.

And these kinds of counts may or may not reflect the actual readership because users may not necessarily open the feed or posts. On the other hand, I think you do have to weight RSS users a little more heavily because right now, as that user base tends to be early adoptors, influencers, and a market that also tends to be the blog writer set. However, this won't always be the case. And I'm not confident that these PR/Communication agencies understand how to read this kind of information, and while it's one thing to gage the influence of a blogger who writes about their clients by reading the post, it's another to make decisions to send sponsorship or advertising based upon these kinds of measurements.

Why am I bringing up this issue of the value of a blog? Because a blog is just software. That's Textpattern, MovableType, Blogger, Scoop, Drupal/CivicSpace, that's all they are, software.

What makes a blog relevant, valuable or important cannot just be the amount of hits they get or the links they have. It's the people in them, the activity occurring in and outside its confines. It all comes down what people do with the software.

For that matter then there has to be a better way to measure within a blog itself the value produced by their contributors, users and readers. There has to be outside of the current measuring trends a better way to understand not just a blogs relevace but, in the political world, the effectiveness of the activity within it.

That's why this site is now running on CivicSpace.

The irony of CivicSpace is that it comes out of what some consider the spectacular failure of the Howard Dean presidential primary campaign. Although I agree with Shirky on his assessment of Dean's political primary losses, the truth is Howard Dean became the most influential of all the Democratic candidates. Where is John Kerry now compared to Howard Dean? Dean would have never become the chairman of the Democratic National Committee without the social, political and certainly the economic capital that he amassed thanks to, in no small part, the netroots infrastructure he created.

Not only that, Howard Dean's influence grows every day with the network of Dean for America sites that are now Democracy for America; and I am going on record right now as saying that I consider DFA to be the unofficial third party of the United States. It's not the Green Party or the Working Families Party. 2008 comes around and we have no impeachment and still a raging Iraq, trust me, Hillary will not get her way into the White House without this huge block of anti-war, pro-impeachment and unapologetically pro-choice Democrats.

So Shirky, who's the loser now?

The Drupal/CivicSpace suite has a cornucopia of tools for engaging people in a myriad of ways that no regular blogging software can. You don't have to be a writer to participate in a CivicSpace site. You can coordinate events. You can coordinate petitions, send out newsletter, publish podcasts, organize GOTV initiatives, set up collaborative books, set up study groups or even run a mini-think tank all from one site. But most importantly, you can assign a value to all these activities and keep track of how much a member of the community contributes regardless of whether they are popular or not. These are not auditing tools but more like valuation tools.

This site right now has the following :

(1) Conventional log statistics that measure outside and inbound links and hits.

(2) A voting system that people can use to rate any entry on the site

(3) A user point system with values that can be modified based on the community's definition of value

(4) Polls & Surveys

(5) Emailing counters that tell you how many times an article was emailed

(6) User blogrolls and bookmarks, that allow people to set their own recommended reading lists

(7) A contact management system that maps internally the relationships between users and of users with external contacts

I am not even sure all of this is going to be used on the site. I have them here because I believe these are the things cooperative communities are made of : of each member finding a way to contribute and understanding the value of their contributions.

CivicSpace allows for a blog to be that, a civic space; a place where netizens are not just passers-by but users, creators and activists as well. It allows for a reader to be in action; to do, to participate.

It has taken me four years to get my hands on the tools that I feel confident will realize part of the vision I had 5 years ago. It took me five years to get here. Little by little. Step by step. Building endurance and a real support structure, not just another new media noise machine.

There is far too much that has not been done with this medium yet. I feel confident that, when it comes to 'Blogging 2.0' it's not just community blogging what will be relevant but cooperative communities building their own economies and ecologies that will prove to be the most successful.

For now though, all you'll see is a blog and that's fine by me.

I'll be happy to do more blogging and less coding. There's a guy named Alito and I'm just fixing to get my ranting and nerding all over him.

Not before I'm done geeking though.

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