Dear readers,
We’re in the process of upgrading Movable Type (our esteemed publishing software) to the latest version and inevitably are experiencing a few hiccups — for instance, our feed seems to have acquired the dreaded “[!]” in Bloglines. We should manage to sort out these little details by day’s end. Please do let us know of any other suspicious irregularities.
One thing you might notice if you scroll down the sidebar is that we’ve replaced our confusing categories system with a confusing tag system. Actually, for now we’re keeping them side by side, in the interest of maximizing confusion. Bear with us as we piece together our taxonomic golem and watch it wreak havoc on our poor, quivering blog, which is, as ever, a work in progress.
<<UPDATE>>
The feeds have been reinstated, and the feeds from the old version of MovableType have been rerouted to their holding location. I believe the old feeds were causing the conflict with the new feeds which is making Bloglines choke. -jdw
<<UPDATE>>
We’ve also decided to reinstate trackback on a provisional basis. Movable Type 3.2 seems to have better moderation and junk-filtering tools so hopefully spammers will be deterred. Trackback is dead! Long live trackback! – bv
Category Archives: movable_type
trackback, adieu
We’ve officially and permanently shut off the trackback function on if:book. We’re sad to do it. The idea of trackback is such a good one — a way to send signals (pings) to other blogs alerting them that one of their posts is being discussed on your site. It ties the blogosphere together, fosters conversations across the web. It was a beautiful dream, but spammers killed it.
Tom Coates pronounced trackback dead back in April, but if:book was only a few months old at the time, still green and optimistic. We were also less known, so spam was only coming in a light sprinkle. Now it’s been a month since our last legitimate ping, and the daily dose of spam has grown so large (and so filthy) that it hardly seems worth it to keep the door open. Fewer bloggers are tracking back now anyway since most have accepted that it is a dying practice, or perhaps haven’t even heard of it at all.
So trackback is done. I just want to say a few goodbyes…
Goodbye, diet pills.
Goodbye, discount sneakers.
Goodbye, ringtones.
Goodbye, hentai comics.
Goodbye, cheap loans (spelled lones).
Goodbye, online pharmacy.
Goodbye, online casino.
Goodbye, texas holdem.
Goodbye, arbitrage sports betting.
Goodbye, free nude black jack.
Goodbye, rape fantasies.
Goodbye, incest stories.
Goodbye, shemale porn.
Goodbye, animal sex.
Goodbye, gay erotica.
Goodbye, tranny surprise.
Goodbye, sex grannies.
A big middle finger to all of you.
premature burial, or, the electronic word in time and space
We were talking yesterday (and Bob earlier) about how to better organize content on if:book – how to highlight active discussion threads, or draw attention to our various categories. Something more dynamic than a list of links on the sidebar, or a bunch of hot threads advertised at the top. A significant problem with blogs is the tyranny of the vertical column, where new entries call out for attention on a stack of rapidly forgotten material, much of which might still be worth reading even though it was posted back in the dark ages (i.e. three days ago). Some of the posts that get buried still have active discussions stemming from them. Just today, “ways of seeing, ways of writing” – posted nearly two weeks ago – received another comment. The conversation is still going. (See also Dan’s “blog reading: what’s left behind”.)
This points to another thorny problem, still unsolved nearly 15 years into the world wide web, and several years into the blogging craze: how to visualize asynchronous conversations – that is, conversations in which time lapses between remarks. If the conversation is between only two people, a simple chronological column works fine – it’s a basic back-and-forth. But consider the place where some of the most dynamic multi-person asynchronous conversations are going on: in the comment streams of blog entries. Here you have multiple forking paths, hopping back and forth between earlier and later remarks, people sticking close to the thread, people dropping in and out. But again, you have the tyranny of the vertical column.
We’re using an open source platform called Drupal for our NextText project, which has a blog as its central element but can be expanded with modular units to do much more than we’re able to do here. The way Drupal handles comments is nice. You have the usual column arranged chronologically, with comments streaming downward, but readers have the option of replying to specific comments, not just to the parent post. Replies to specific comments are indented slightly, creating a sort of sub-stream, and the the fork can keep on going indefinitely, indenting rightward.
This handles forks and leaps fairly well, but offers at best only a partial solution. We’re still working with a print paradigm: the outline. Headers, sub-headers, bullet points. These distinguish areas in a linear stream, but they don’t handle the non-linear character of complex conversations. There is always the linear element of time, but this is extremely limiting as an organizing principle. Interesting conversations make loops. They tangle. They soar. They sag. They connect to other conversations.
But the web has so far been dominated by time as an organizing principle, new at the top and old at the bottom (or vice versa), and this is one the most-repeated complaints people have about it. The web favors the new, the hot, the immediate. But we’re dealing with a medium than can also handle space, or at least the perception of space. We need not be bound to lists and outlines, we need not plod along in chronological order. We could be looking at conversations as terrains, as topographies.
The electronic word finds itself in an increasingly social context. We need to design a better way to capture this – something that gives the sense of the whole (the big picture), but allows one to dive directly into the details. This would be a great challenge to drop into a design class. Warren Sack developed a “conversation map” for news groups in the late 90s. From what I can tell, it’s a little overwhelming. I’m talking about something that draws people right in and gets them talking. Let’s look around.