It was one of those “blinding light” moments – the moment when you finally turn to acknowledge the feeling that’s been kicking around for many months and realise “oh yeah!”

I finally discovered that I really hate Facebook.

It’s not like I’m the first – the most famous incidence being Jason Calcanis’s decision to declare “Facebook Bankruptcy” back in July, an event which trickled by without actively triggering my own epiphany. My realisation was prompted by a conversation with someone who recently heard a talk by a Facebook developer. The salient point, from the horse’s mouth, was that Facebook believe that their application is compellingly relevant to its users “because everyone you add on Facebook is someone you want to hear from.”

Evidently no-one on Facebook staff is being bombarded with the constant “Zombie requests”, Quiz requests, “rate your movies” requests and other effluvia which, post-trumpeted-API-launch, have become a veritable Face-tsunami. Furthermore, no-one at Facebook seems to know anything about psychology, social networks or the interaction between the two.

There are two major problems with the “all your Facebook friends are relevant to you” hypothesis.

Firstly, social networks tend to morph under the weight of human psychology into a Pokemon-like popularity contest – “gotta catch ‘em all” – you add everyone you’ve ever so much as exchanged glances with, and anyone with less than 50 friends looks like a lonely loser.

Secondly, it’s very hard to deny friend requests since it’s obvious that you’ve done so and it’s a pretty blunt snub. Even if you don’t care much about the latest “addee” in your stream, few people want to be seen by their former schoolfriends as an unfriendly snob, and even fewer people want to upset a professional contact who may be a key ally at some point in the future…

…which is why everyone’s contact list balloons over time – for many months I had only 8 contacts on Facebook; by the time of last night’s revelation, that had grown to 125. There are only three possible answers to this -

1. Bite the bullet, and reconcile yourself to the idea of coming across as an asshole.
2. Add people until your “Feed” looks like a cross between Toys’R'Us and a warzone.
3. Get the hell out of Dodge (my current preferred solution).

I care in some way about every single one of the people I added on Facebook, but I don’t want to answer their movie quizzes, become their “zombie victim” or engage in an online “food fight” with them. And here’s the ultimate kicker – for the people I really care about, I have (or should have) far more direct contact with them – phone calls, personal emails, real-life meetings; all of which render the fairly cursory, sterile experience of a Facebook exchange irrelevant. And if anyone else wants to get hold of me, it’s not hard to find me – search engines have a pretty good idea of where I am, for one thing.

We’ve forgotten something in the Great Web 2.0 Social Circlejerk, and that is: you can only really have a small number of true friends, because friendship takes time – meeting, communicating, supporting… there’s nothing lonelier than having 200 “friends”, and realising that you couldn’t really turn to a single one of them if the bottom fell out of your world tomorrow. I’m reminded here of a line from Mary Schmich’s “Wear Sunscreen” (as immortalised in the incredibly cheesy Baz Luhrman track)…

Understand that friends come and go, but for the precious few you
should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and
lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you
knew when you were young.

Many people will probably disagree at this point, which is just fine, although as the days whizz by I find myself hearing “Facebook is annoying” from more and more people. But here’s the real kicker about Facebook, and the inspiration for the title of this post…

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave…

I logged on this morning, resolving to kick Facebook into touch, and looking for a “delete my profile” button. Only there isn’t one. Instead, you can “deactivate” your profile.

I decided to do that, and went through the form which asks about your reason for leaving and then pops up patronising DHTML prompts which attempt to counter that reason. Then I came to the checkbox at the bottom of the form – “Opt out of Facebook emails”. I’ll need to paraphrase here as I no longer have Facebook access, but it was explained along these lines:

Your friends will still be able to tag photos of you, and invite you to groups and events. Check this box if you’d like to opt out of notifications of these events.

Huh. So if I leave Facebook, stuff can still happen on my profile, even though I’m no longer there? That feels… wrong. I completed the deactivation, but was curious… if I reactivated my profile, what would happen?

Reactivating is a case of logging in, and then clicking on a link they email to you.

Click… and “bam!”, there was my profile, complete with all the contacts, groups and “zombie invite” clutter there’d been before. Clearly, truly quitting Facebook takes work. Lots of work.

To opt out of any friend-related activity, it seems that you need to actually delete those friendships. Three clicks per delete – the “delete” link, an “Are you sure?”/”OK” exchange, and another “OK” to dimiss confirmation. 375 mouse-clicks to drop those 125 nodes on my “social graph”… plus more to actually dismiss the zombie crap, leave groups and generally close things down. Just the thought of it gives my brain RSI.

This is, plainly, an unforgivably shitty user experience. I don’t expect any service to insist that once I have an account, I will always have an account – not my bank, not an online retailer, and certainly not something as inessential and inconsequential as a social network.

It also belies a stunning level of insecurity. “Lock-in” is the last refuge of the weak – a tactic used by people convinced that their service is so awful that everyone will up and walk away if they don’t force them to stay. Prisons have locked gates for a reason; Facebook (if they’re as truly confident about the “essential” nature of their service as they say in public) should not.

I’m really interested as to how this plays out in the long run. Facebook has more hype than you can shake a stick at and a strongly-rumored big queue of Big Money at the door. Furthermore, as Google’s stock price tops out and its “Don’t be Evil; have a free gourmet lunch; take 20% for a personal project” culture dissipates under the inevitable strains of growth, Facebook is becoming the Hot New Place for smart developers to pitch tent and get to work.

They may yet do something truly revolutionary, or tweak the model so it actually appeals to grumpy old bastards like me. If I were them, I’d lock the API down a lot more and insist on reviewing apps before they’re allowed onto the site – rather like console manufacturers do with games. Cut the deluge of useless apps, and concentrate on the ones which actually add value.

Facebook, as it is, is just unbearable in a way that even MySpace (for all its unreliability and layout hideousness) just can’t muster. Even though it was a chore to quit it, I feel better already.

I’m periodically fascinated by how people view online life, and the differences in the boundaries that they set (or perceive) on the internet, versus that “other” life with the blue ceiling and the third dimension.

My curiosity was piqued again this weekend when one of my posts here attracted a totally unrelated comment asking a Flickr support question.

I’m astounded that someone managed to take a path from my recent occasional stints helping out on Flickr’s support forum, all the way to this place which (save for occasional posts where my personal interests or life experiences overlap with work) is totally unrelated to my place of employment.

I can very well imagine the route they took – they saw my posts on the forum, followed them to my profile, and followed the link from there to here before posting. But…

…To me, such an action is the online equivalent of visiting a local store, and rather than resolving an issue at the “Customer Service” desk, instead following a store employee home, knocking on their door and asking for resolution of your issue then and there.

The two simply aren’t connected, and making them so leaves me feeling a little unsettled. Yes, I work as an engineer for a popular website, and yes, I occasionally pitch in to help with people’s concerns and worries, especially when my fellow Flickr-ers are out of commission for one reason or another.

But… that’s my day job. When I come home (or post on hitherto.net), I really don’t want my work life to follow me there.

I feel the same way, incidentally, about my Flickr stream – even though I work on the site, I don’t expect people to take my personal little corner of it and attempt to vent their frustration or seek a resolution through it (any more than I’d expect them to come to the office in person and berate me in the break room).

It’s very easy to see online entities as impersonal “machines” – many sites have even cultivated that image, seemingly as a way to streamline their customer interactions into manageable processes. Flickr has, in fact, tried to avoid that where possible – most of the staff still pitch in and try to offer assistance on the site’s forum, and we try to be polite and efficiently helpful whilst injecting a little humour and personality into the mix.

So, a quick plea to the world in general – when you’re seeking assistance online, please do try to apply the same boundaries to your interactions as you would in real life. Otherwise, you’re going to trigger a quick blog post and very little else in response.

The “Penguins Only” photo on this post is from QuestingBeast on Flickr.

Okay, so I broke. It took twelve days, but in the end I just couldn’t wait any longer to get an iPhone into my life.

I’d rationalised against it for weeks before launch – “the keyboard looks like it needs some work”; “never buy 1st Gen Apple hardware”; “wait for 3G instead of EDGE”. But this thing seemed truly amazing – a whole new experience as far as mobile devices are concerned. Ultimately, I wanted in on the ground floor.

So I’m slightly late to the party, and possibly not adding much at this point (I really haven’t scanned the interblogwebnet to see what others are saying about their phones), but I wanted to write down some first impressions, partly for my own later reference, partly for any of the 5 readers of this site who might not have got their hands on an actual iPhone yet.

Getting the boring stuff out of the way first, yes, it’s amazing. The UI is fluid and responsive – the original MacWorld demo and the existent tutorials aren’t gussied up to make it look any better; it really works like that. It is, in short, a thing of utter beauty, and takes mobile usability to a completely different level.

There are several worries I had which have proved unfounded so far.

Battery life seems good. I’ve been using the phone exhaustively (hey, it’s a new toy) and haven’t run into any “argh, battery low” moments yet. We’ll see how it holds out in the long term.

The EDGE thing is less annoying than I thought it would be – the slight speed problems of the connection are more than made up for by the ease-of-navigation around networked content.

The keyboard is perfectly usable after about an hour of practice. In some ways tactile feedback would be nice, but… I’ve never found the teeny-tiny button keyboards on any smartphones to be any better.

All in all, if I was at Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola or Samsung right now I’d be sick as a dog.

That said, here’s the problem with being Apple. Their products are often so very nearly perfect. You can tell that a lot of very dedicated people have spent a lot of time applying a breathtaking eye for detail. The downside of this is that the smallest details which are forgotten (and there will always be a few) stand out so much more.

So, with the basic assumption that the iPhone is jaw-dropping, here are the niggles I’ve found in the first few days…

1) Inconsistency with portrait vs. landscape

The best part about the keyboard is that in landscape mode (mainly in Safari at present) it’s super-usable because there’s more space. This fact makes it really really annoying that in other apps (including Mail, Notes, Calendar, SMS and Contacts) there’s no landscape mode. Turn the phone sideways and nothing happens. More consistency on this would be a godsend – I’d go so far as to suggest that all apps (except iPod video, maybe) should honour the orientation of the phone.

Also, the accelerometer needs the phone to be fairly upright in order to trigger, which leads to some odd “hokey cokey”-like hand movements to get the view to shift, but I suspect that’s pretty much an unsolvable problem.

Finally, the orientation “locks” if the keyboard is open. So you can’t flip your safari view if, say, you’re halfway through typing a URL on the small “portrait” keyboard and want to switch to the bigger one.

2) International number support seems a bit shaky

I have most international numbers (UK-based friends and family) stored as “+44 XXXX XXX XXX”, the standard international format. On my N73 these were always parsed correctly, connecting through to the number in question whether I was in the US or abroad. The iPhone doesn’t seem to handle this though – a text that I tried to a UK phone got a return error message from AT&T complaining that the number was in the wrong format

This is more than a little wrong, and becomes truly annoying when you hit the Phone options pane and see an “International Assist” setting which, I quote, “automatically adds the correct prefix to US numbers when dialling from abroad.”

That’s the kind of slightly embarrassing US-centric error I don’t really expect Apple to make, and I’m not sure what to do about it. I really don’t want to store my UK contacts as “011 44 XXXX XXX XXX”, because then the numbers won’t work when I’m abroad.

“Sit back and hope for a software fix” seems to be the only option.

3) You can’t add contacts to groups

iPhone supports the OS X Address Book’s concept of “groups”, which is great for creating a quick list of co-workers, friends, or local restaurants, say. But there’s no method (that I can find) of adding contacts to those groups on the phone itself. You have to organise them on your computer and then sync the phone. This is particularly annoying because of the good Contacts integration in many iPhone apps.

I noticed this niggle last night when I added a local pizza restaurant to my contacts list direct from the Google Maps app where I found it, and then couldn’t add it to my “Local Businesses” group inside the phone.

4) No re-ordering in the Stock or Weather widgets

In most list views on the iPhone (favourite contacts, for example), there are little buttons you can hold and drag to reorder the list. Not in the widgets though, which is annoying if you have a particular order you want (most visited to least visited places’ weather, for example) because you have to delete the whole list and re-enter it if you really want that order.

5) Mail can’t count

Okay, this is small and petty, but Mail keeps telling me that my account (currently accessed through POP) has “-1 Messages Read”, which is kinda dumb. It shouldn’t matter, but I expect this shiny object, a piece of the Star Trek future somehow warped into my lap, to be utterly perfect in every way.

6) Um… I only have 5 tiny things to whine about

iPhone is a truly stunning achievement. I’ve not been so happy to use (and excited about) a mobile device since I got my first mobile, a Nokia 8110 “banana phone” about 10 years ago. And the big promise of this thing is that regular software updates will be forthcoming from Apple. So hopefully 3 or 4 months from now, the entire list above will be obsolete.

And if that happens, Apple will have pretty much achieved the unachievable – a highly complex device which is, to all intents and purposes, flawless.

Wow.

We’ve come a long way on the internet in the past 2 years. So far so fast, in fact, that when you’re living in the centre of it all and incrementally immersing yourself in it, it becomes easy to forget where you came from.

I was thinking along these lines because I was just tinkering with my account on Upcoming.org, adding a new event to the database and subscribing to some others. Having added the event in question, I linked in a freely-available mp3 by one of the bands. That done, I finally got around to adding the feed of my events on upcoming.org to my iCal calendar on my mac. And then I tagged some Flickr photos from Hack Day so that they show up in the event’s entry on upcoming.org…

In less than 10 minutes, I’d told the world about an imminent concert, filled my personal, portable calendar with events which I’ll want to attend, and shown people another angle of an event which happened last week. And none of this required any complex scripts, hours of screen-scraping or data-munging. It was all accomplished with a couple of clicks and a little bit of typing.

Another example; this morning’s blogosphere-darling, Rentometer, which takes your location and self-disclosed rent, and plots it against all the other entered data for your area. It’s nice to know that my apartment is reasonably priced, and it wouldn’t be at all possible without a simple site powered, crucially, by freely addressable mapping systems.

We didn’t have this three years ago. And it’s been coming in leaps and bounds and tiny steps, but today is the first day I really stopped for a second and let myself realise how rich and complex the network of freely-transportable data (and the APIs which support its transfer) has become, and how much cool stuff is starting to come out of it…

Which only leaves one caveat.

“Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. … That tension will not go away”

So runs (as Wikipedia freely tells me) the condensed version of the geek crowd’s favoured soundbite. At present, the services which are driving the free data bonanza are, more or less, free to participate in and to use. So far, we’ve really just been exploring what’s possible, and reveling in that. Longer term, I’m not sure that many people have worked out how to make this economy pay on a large scale – and in terms of investors, programmers, bandwidth and computing power, someone somewhere always needs paying.

It’s cool what we’ve accomplished so far. The next step is ensuring that we can continue to accomplish it without a 2000-style collapse of the data economy, or a sudden dramatic increase in the cost of participation.

Now there’s a “hack” that’ll make someone a lot of money.

The first was best summarised by Chris Messina in his piece “The Future of White Boy clubs” (executive summary: “far too many speakers and attendees at these things are white men; how do we change that?”).

The second cropped up in multiple conversations. For a lot of attendees FoWA was an odd conference, because they’d seen most of the speakers giving similar talks before, usually some time in the past 12 months. This isn’t a criticism of FoWA as such – what they built, very successfully, was a cheap, quick and engaging “Best Web Conference Speeches in the world… Ever!” album.

I personally found it very rewarding, but I’m a latecomer to the conference scene, and haven’t done the usual round of SXSW Interactive, Etech, OsCon, FooCamp/BarCamp, etcetera.

One conclusion you could draw from this is that a lot of ‘alpha geeks’ attend too many conferences; that there are only so many things to talk about. But conferences are hugely useful in providing ‘face time’ with creative people from all over the world, and every occasion provides opportunities for new connections and conversations. Maybe the problem isn’t the number of conferences, but the fact that they’re all focussed around listening to clever people talk about… stuff.

There might be a solution to all this, though, and I think I saw it pioneered this weekend on the main Yahoo! campus.

“Hack Day” has been around internally at Yahoo! for a little while now, and is a brilliantly simple idea – persuade as many people as possible to take a single 24-hour period out of their normal working time to take an idea from concept to prototype. I’ve heard the concept compared (often unfavourably) to Google’s famed “20 percent rule” (take this digg thread, for example), but that really misses the point. Hack Day isn’t about building the next Gmail, or an entire social network system. It’s about thinking small, extensible and useful – a single product feature, plugin or simple service which doesn’t yet exist. And, importantly, it’s about focus.

All the truly brilliant geeks I know are (in accordance with Larry Wall’s famous saying) lazy, impatient and hubristic. It can take a hard deadline or a truly transformative project to get the very best out of us. Hack Day (unlike Google’s 20%) provides exactly that deadline, and it provides a challenge to hubris – “I can build an entire complicated Frobicator in less than a day”.

Hack Day has led to all sorts of interesting avenues of enquiry and feature additions which are now parts of Yahoo! products. These are often the kind of thing which leap out of one person’s particular idea; they wouldn’t necessarily make it through a project review process and into a high-level “roadmap”, but they’re still useful and cool. To my mind, the only possible weakness of Hack Days is that sometimes they seem a little shoe-gazy, a little inward-focussed on “Yahoo! stuff”.

Cue Open Hack Day, the same concept opened up to outside developers. There was one caveat – projects were supposed to use at least one Yahoo!-driven API or service, but with so many to choose from these days, that wasn’t a highly limiting constraint.

There was a mini conference of sorts on Friday – plenty of talks on how to use Yahoo!’s APIs and UI Library, as well as more general talks like Andy Baio‘s highly entertaining exploration of the ways in which online communities spawn offline meetings or gratherings. There was also (as you may have heard) an evening concert by Beck – a huge coup by any standards, and one of the best shows I’ve seen this year.

But honestly, the Beck concert was not the highlight of Hack Day. That came once the actual hacking was underway. It was simply amazing to see so many groups busy working away on their various ideas, occasionally asking each other for help, tables drowning in seas of Red Bull cans. I particularly enjoyed wandering the hallways at 3am, coming across a team making their “blogging in motion” bag with a sewing machine and soldering iron.

And I had ridiculous fun working on my own hack with Mattb, a superhero of a man who somehow managed to stay awake for 30 hours straight (personally, I had to collapse at about 4:30am and catch a few hours’ sleep), and Kelsey on design duty.

It’s the first time in ages that I’ve so concentratedly sat down with an abstract idea and just churned away at it manically, trying to get a working prototype in place as soon as possible. The good feeling was helped by the way in which news of everyone’s hack efforts filtered around the building. We must have had 5 or 6 groups drop by, interested in seeing a live demo of our system because they’d heard about it from other people, and I know that I told everyone I saw about the awesome hacks I’d stumbled across.

So what does this have to do with the future of geek conferences? Well, the “doing stuff” focus of Hack Day made for a fundamentally different, and ultimately more rewarding experience. Traditional “speaker track” conferences are, for most attendees, more of a consumptory than a participatory event. At Hack Day, in contrast, most people left with a feeling of having created something. They learned stuff, talked about stuff, socialised, made new contacts, and listened to Beck. But they also had something concrete at the end of it – something they could point to and say “I made that, overnight, in Yahoo!’s staff canteen.”

This, then, is one possible way to democratise the conference experience – to turn everyone into more of a participant. And I do mean everyone – even if you’re not a wizard with code there are countless ways to participate in a hack. You might have design skills which you can contribute. You might be invaluable in offering ideas for execution. You might be able to hack together a quick marketing blurb for the project. Or you might simply be able to offer your services as “beta tester”, helping to make things better.

Yes, it’s true that a majority of the Hack Day participants were still white and male. But there was a much better mix than at FoWA, and the “barrier to entry” of participation was way lower. The most entertaining Hack presentation was given by an Indian; the overall “best hack” prize won by a team of women. Technology as a whole still has challenges to overcome in encouraging equality, but for sure, encouraging a “hack culture” is not going to set it back any.

Software engineers are incredibly lucky in that this kind of thing is possible in our industry. You couldn’t run an inpromptu drug trial at a Pharmaceutical conference, or bus in a load of kids and subject them to experimental lessons at a Teachers’ conference. But we can hack – and many of our most successful ideas (including Flickr, del.icio.us, upcoming.org and Yahoo! itself) essentially started out as hacks.

Hack Day went off brilliantly for all involved, and I’m happy and proud to have been a part of it. But let’s learn from it, and keep getting people involved. Clear off a couple of days’ worth of familiar talks from your conference schedules and get everyone together to Just Build Stuff. Let’s have an eTech where technology actually emerges, a SXSW which is “interactive” in a much deeper sense, a Foo Camp where people spend their time manipulating the contents of $foo…

Hack Day was an enormous, scary experiment by the YDN team – no-one really knew how it would go down, but they took the gamble anyway. I don’t think anyone expected it to turn out as awesome as it was. Chad, Caterina and the rest of the (hundred-plus) team who worked on it proved the concept irrefutably. Now it’s up to everyone else to build on that beginning.

Not because I’ve really failed at anything, but see, I have this enormous backlog of photos, reaching back to May of this year, and I just haven’t got around to adding them to my flickr stream.

Every time I get around to titling, tagging and uploading a few more photos I feel strange that the events depicted happened so long ago.

It is, perhaps, the price of an ever-more immediate world in which current events are photo-blogged the minute they unfold, and every current event is dissected and commented upon in thousands of blogs, as it happens.

Gone are the days when news would come neatly-distilled 24 hours after it occurred. TV channels still break with their programming for coverage of the very biggest “breaking stories”, sure, but on the web, it seems, everything is “breaking news”, 24 hours a day.
This is a new world. Even 5 years ago during the September 11th attacks – undoubtedly this new century’s biggest story so far – most of us got our news from rolling TV coverage. There was no flickr to receive “on the ground” photos from amateurs, no youtube for instant video. The obvious places to get news – bbc.co.uk, cnn.com – collapsed under the weight of traffic. If the same thing happened again we would be awash in distributed eyewitness reports and coverage within minutes.

This is by no means a bad thing, but it offers us interesting challenges for the future. How can any one user consolidate this massive, fragmented information stream into a coherent narrative? And how can we facilitate the desire to create “instant accounts”?

At an extreme, it’s easy to envision cameras with on-board GPS, WiFi/bluetooth and integrated keyboards so that events can be captured, meta-data added and the whole package uploaded in real-time.

But what about the more mundane life-events? A small conference in San Mateo, or a weekend trip to the beach? In pre-digital days these were private moments. Photos would be developed weeks or months later, added to paper albums perhaps months after that. Brought out and shared occasionally at family events.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this model – at the end of the day, few people care about my experience of Maker Faire, or the time I visited Alcatraz with my sister.

But still, the immediacy of this new connected world nags at me. I can share these things, instantly, with family, friends, strangers. And because it’s possible, I want it.

In time, technology will probably make these things easier. And meanwhile, I guess we just have to rely on making time, on dedication, and on that nagging sense of failure.

In those days web search was a very nascent industry, and my first guide to the sea of sites was a weird little directory called “Yahoo!”. I was studying English Literature at the time, and natural nerd though I always was, if someone had told me that 7 years later I would land an engineering job with the very same Yahoo!, I would have laughed in their faces.

From Yahoo! I jumped to using Altavista, still owned by DEC at the time. And not long after, I remember the buzz of discovering my first online “meme” – the Babelfish translation service, and the hilarious things it did to texts when you translated them through successive languages and back to English.

Over the past three years I’ve been directly involved in working with all three of those early online inspirations, and it’s been an amazing experience which has taught me a great deal, allowed me to do work of which I’m truly proud, and inadvertently catapulted me 5000+ miles across the globe.

But it’s time for a slight change, and so today marks my first day working on something slightly different – as of now I am the latest engineer to join the talented and possibly slightly insane team at Flickr.

Yeah, I’m pretty excited. When I first saw flickr 20-odd months ago, I was bowled over by it, and signed up for an account pretty much on the spot. In comparison to much of the “Web 2.0″ hype-froth we’ve been enduring since, flickr just did stuff well. Yes, you could add tags to photos, and yes there was Ajax magic all over the place. But it was there to help get things done, seemingly free of pretension. Seeing flickr was my “web 2.0″ version of those first internet days back in 1996, discovering weird new sites through the Yahoo! directory and mangling classic literature in babelfish.

And if someone had told me, back when I first saw flickr, that I would eventually get the chance to work on it… well, I would have laughed in their faces.

Oh, and just so we’re clear,

• No, I can’t get you a free account.
• No, I can’t give you direct technical support on flickr problems.
• No, anything I say on hitherto.net is categorically not an opinion of flickr, flickr’s grandmothers, or Yahoo!. I speak for myself, bub.
• Yes, the uber-cool flickr feature that you really really want is probably coming, just as soon as I have time to build it.

Which is just the first problem – what the hell is podcasting anyway?

For the sake of some brevity, I want to tackle two things which seem to fall under this latest abortion of a word:

1. Recording yourself rambling on about something, and releasing it on the web.
2. Using RSS Media Enclosures to distribute audio content.

The majority of my scorn is reserved for the former.

See, it’s really quite simple. Just because you have a face for radio does not mean that you have a voice for radio.

In fact, for the most part the inverse seems to be true. I’ve tried to listen to a few bona-fide “definition 1″ podcasts All of them contained the horrors of someone’s muffled nasal whine pontificating on topics which were dull enough even when he had the good grace to write them down so I could skip to the actual point.

This may sound elitist, but… well, no, it is elitist. Spoken-word performance is an art which very few people can master, and I say that as someone who’s actually tried and just barely scraped by.

All the podcasts I’ve heard have lacked the following essential qualities:

• Professional presentation – no ums, ahs, dead-end rambling sentences or “dead air”
• A clear, articulate voice.
• A lack of interference from other sound sources
• A clear point to their existence, communicating something of actual note

There’s a simple reason that these things are lacking – good radio takes time and effort to produce. It takes some scripting (yes, even for live broadcasts). It takes more than a passing knowledge of sound engineering. Even if you’re from a rickety hut in the middle of a muddy festival site (yes, I’ve seen it done) you still need a few guys around who can make like MacGuyver with a tea-tray, an old cassette deck and some copper tubing to produce professional-quality sound.

You, oh pod-caster, are an untrained amateur. You’re never going to produce a home video which is hailed as a Scorcese-esque masterpiece, and, guess what? You ain’t Radio 4 either. Not even close.

The fair-enough response to that might be “so don’t listen to my podcast then.” And, well, I don’t. But I remain completely puzzled by the fact that you’re bothering to record this stuff. Why on earth would you pour an hour or more per “broadcast” into something which you’re really, really bad at?

And why, after several months, do I access another podcast (after succumbing to the sort of curiosity which mangles felines), and find that you haven’t improved an iota?

At least, in the nature of all internet neologisms, the term is so broad that it does actually cover a few things which don’t make my ears cringe.

The following are potentially interesting:

• Local/amateur/pirate radio stations who stream their programmes and provide an RSS feed
• Bands/music labels who provide lists of tracks via an RSS feed

Uh, I ran out, but I’m open to the suggestion that there are many more uses.

But here’s the thing which upsets me – we’re back with the same-old same-old. It’s a useless, misleading, broad term. And an ugly one. Again.

Firstly, I know that Apple have seized the soul of most of the “I’m so hip I’m following a million other Starbucks Venti Latte drinkers” scene, but hey, the iPod isn’t the only music player on the market. It wasn’t the first. It isn’t the best either. Drop the “pod”.

Secondly, “broadcasting” is the act of sending a continuous stream of programming which people can receive and consume as it is sent. Y’know, like Broadcast TV or Broadcast Radio. Archived material is not “broadcast”, it’s “streamed” or “downloaded”. Drop the “casting”.

Thirdly, the RSS “enclosure” tag is badly specified, and not something to by hyped endlessly.

• 12216320 what? Seconds? Bytes? Bits? Elephants?
• “audio/mpeg”, sure. But I have to discern the codec version from the filename? That’s reliable… Didn’t people bash Microsoft for that years ago?

Sheesh.

Finally, can we stop complicating RSS now please? Remember that middle letter, and the fact that it once stood for “simple”?

…so again, yes, I’m kinda hung up on semantics. But these things matter to me, and they should matter to you too. Our language is all we have to describe the world around us. Do we have to pollute it with faddish terms? And do we have to disseminate it in voices which really, really don’t sound good when recorded?

I don’t think we do, but I don’t expect you to agree either.

If you’re new to it, tagging is nothing more than assigning keywords to a piece of content, usually at the point of publication. A good example is the photo site flickr. When I upload a photo to the site I choose some words which are appropriate to describe the picture. These usually take the form of place names, people or objects found in the photo.

This is all about simple yet rich metadata, and it’s suprisingly effective. On flickr, for example, it’s now trivial for me to go back and view all my photos of wood, or those depicting Half Dome in Yosemite.

Apply the concept across a diverse group of photographers, and you get a collaborative picture of Half Dome which is built from the combined micro-efforts of each photographer to apply the tag.

Tagging, of course, doesn’t just have to be about photos. delicious uses the same concept to categorise bookmarks, and we’re even starting to see blogging tools that allow users to apply tags to their posts.

As a descriptive mechanism and a search tool, tagging is incredibly powerful. It is not, however, a “folksonomy”. Here’s why.

The beauty of tagging systems which build up a pool of associated concepts is that they’re flat, rather than hierarchical. Whilst it’s possible to infer from the way they’re used that the tag “Half Dome” fits with the tag “Yosemite”, there’s no defined relationship between Yosemite, Yosemite Geographical Features and Half Dome.

This is why “folksonomy” is a misnomer when applied to tag systems. It’s consciously implying a root in “taxonomy”, but misusing that root on the way.

What is a taxonomy?

The classification of organisms in an ordered system that indicates natural relationships.

Tagging is almost the opposite of that – an unordered system which implies natural relationships.

The logical step on from this is to envisage a system where we had a true “folksonomy”, introducing the concept of hierarchical relationships into the extant “tag soup”. I’m pretty confident that human nature would preclude the success of this right now.

The main advantage of “flat” classification is that it’s pretty non-confrontational. Sure, people might object a little if I insisted on tagging every photo I ever took as “Half Dome”, but it’s not in my interests to break the system in that way.

On flickr, you can also add tags to other folks’ photos, which takes the distributed effort mechanism one step further. Even here, there’s little need for confrontation, and in fact the results can be cool. I’m still amused that a friend added a tag to a picture of my lounge to denote the name of my Ikea bookshelves – “billy”.

“Billy” bookshelves, however, neatly illustrate the two big problems a true folksonomy would face.

1) Namespace Collision

Looking at the range of photos on flickr tagged with the word billy there are people, pet dogs and cats, bars and, well, my furniture.

It’s fairly easy using flickr’s tag system to specify, say, a search for all photos tagged with “billy” and “cat”, so I can easily view an implied set of photos depicting cats called Billy.

The beauty part is that there was no huge effort on the part of the person tagging their photo. They didn’t have to somehow pick a tag which said “Animals -> Domestic Pets -> Cats -> Billy” out of a giant tree in order to successfully tag the photo. They just put “cat” and then “billy”.

A hierarchy would necessitate lots of “billy” entries – one for bars, one for people, one for cats, one for furniture… Instantly, we’ve massively increased the complexity of both the tagging application, and the process of tagging each piece of information.

2) Agreeing Relationships

Say we did try to build a hierarchy. I dread to think of the arguments that would ensue. Humans aren’t terribly good at coming up with consistent hierarchical systems. For an example, look at the valiant attempt now being made by WikiMedia to bring together existing biological taxonomies on Wikispecies. The reason a project like this even exists is that up until now the science community has managed to create several fragmented hierarchies which don’t quite agree with each other.

Let’s go back to our pet cat Billy. How would I successfully place him in a hierarchy?

Earlier I suggested “Animals -> Pets -> Cats -> Billy”. But that’s not necessarily the best.

How about this:

“Eukarya -> Animalia -> Mammalia -> Felis -> Felis Domesticus -> Persian -> Billy”

After all, Billy might be a Lion (“Eukarya -> Animalia -> Mammalia -> Felis -> Panthera Leo -> Billy”)

…and so on. By classing my cat under strict species, I can’t easily show that he’s a pet, unless I choose both the classification above and my initial pet idea.

Mind you, there’s an argument with those biological classifications above – I’ve left out several important layers of the biological taxonomy. Some sticklers for accuracy might create a new tree which ensures they’re represented.

This, in short, is a bloody nightmare.

So, a true “folksonomy” is unworkable. Why care?

Simply put, words matter, and this one is a mistake for two reasons.

1) Inaccuracy is bad

By allying itself with Taxonomy, “Folksonomy” misleads the mind to expect the mess illustrated above. This is bad both because some poor fool might try to actually implement such a system, but also because it potentially puts people off getting involved in the useful, simple, pleasurable act of tagging their stuff.

2) Elitism is bad

I don’t know who coined “folksonomy”, but I can guess that it was probably an idea which seemed cute around a beer-laden table in a pub somewhere (see warchalking).

In confusing the complications of taxonomy with tagging and coining a new multi-syllable word, however, the “geek” community who are popularising it are building a wall around it. Whether intentional or not, the word has the effect of making the process sound complicated.

Let’s face it, which description would sound better to your parents, your grandparents or the little old lady who sells you your morning paper?

• Say you have a photo of your dog? You just attach the tag word “dog” to the photo by typing it into a box. Then when you want to find it again, you just search for “dog”… that’s what tagging is.

• Say you have a photo of your dog? You just attach the folksonomic category “dog” to the photo by typing it into a box… Then your photo is represented within the folksonomy as depicting a dog…

C’mon people. When we use flickr or delicious we’re “tagging”. The combination of those tags doesn’t lead to anything high-falutin or organised – it leads to a “tag soup”.

Doesn’t that sound more inviting, warming and comforting?

Nuh-uh. You’re not even close. Still not a damn blog.

I guess that some people would probably accuse me of dabbling in mere semantics at this point, and I think, to be fair, they’d be correct. This site (particularly on the other side of the fence, where I write an irregular diary about relocating from London to Silicon Valley) has an awful lot in common with others which fall under the banner of “blogs”.

But the semantics of the issue are important to me.

Things have changed since I first attempted to explain the problem I had with “blogging” back in 2002.

The tools have steadily improved, for one thing. After all sorts of wacky CMS experiments, I settled on Movable Type for the newest incarnation of this site because it’s now flexible enough to handle what I wanted to do without too much pain, especially since I now have a pet topic which actually warrants a diary-like structure. At the same time, I’ve managed to beat it into enough shape to act as an archive of sporadically written works. This is good.

The definition of “blog” has also solidified somewhat since 2002, to cover a personal, diary-formatted site, often written with a focus on a particular subject or set of subjects. This is a good thing. At least it gives the concept substance.

But two major problems nonetheless remain.

The Ugliest of Words

I’ve never tried to explain this fully before. Somehow it seems a strange argument to be making, but one of the problems I have with the word “blog” is that it’s repulsive.

Find yourself a mirror. Sit down in front of it and consciously say the word “blog”. Watch your mouth as you do so. It’s a word which has to be screwed around the mouth and spat out. It’s not pretty at all.

It’s an unfortunate collision of phonemes. Thinking about words which use similar sounds, I came up with blag, slog, grog, blob, slob, glob, lob, clog, flog…

Many of them are colloquial. Almost all of them describe something unpleasant, uncouth or somehow “rough” in execution. Words aren’t just conceptual. They have aesthetics and aural qualities, and unfortunately “blog” falls in with a bad crowd.

The etymology of “blog” makes sense enough – a contraction of “web log”, a term which was used to denote a regularly updated list of, well, stuff, on the web. But here we find an interesting trend amongst technologists – to reduce concepts to the fewest possible syllables

Brevity is good, for sure, but not at the expense of clarity or indeed linguistic elegance.

Of course, the obvious response to all this is “what would you use instead?”, and as the years have rolled by that’s become a harder question to answer because, ugly or not, “blog” has worked its way into fairly common usage.

Attempting to replace a common word with another is invariably an awkward, foolhardy enterprise which is doomed to leave one in the company of the Academie Francaise and their denigration of “le weekend.”

A final note on a related word – “blogosphere”. Something about this just makes my teeth stand on end. Perhaps it’s the unholy wedding of “log” (a germanic-rooted word arising from Middle English) with “sphere” (from a Greek root). It’s like a traffic accident of words. Are blogs really so special that the concept of “the web” (of which they are a small part) won’t suffice?

Holy Smoke, Bat-blog!

“Blogs set to destroy mainstream media” is becoming a common theme in various places these days. To read some pieces, you’d think that the blog was a new superhero, here to clean up a corrupt Gotham City.

You can find much of this stuff with websearches such as “weblogs killing journalism”, “blogs death of newspaper” “blogs change the world” etc. Some examples include:

• Participatory Journalism and the inevitable death of newspapers
• The Mainstream Media suffering from freedom envy
• The News of My Death
• Blogs ARE transforming journalism

I don’t buy it, though, for two reasons.

Journalism?

There’s a broad gap between journalism and punditry. To be fair, journalists themselves can be guilty of blurring the distinction, but only to a limited degree. Journalism is about the reporting of events, not about commentary on their significance from a particular standpoint.

But, some argue, a lot of mainstream media is just punditry laid over the top of copy from AP, Reuters et al. Maybe the lazy stuff, yes, but in any newspaper of note the majority of the content comes in-house. AP and Reuters were designed to (and continue to) fill the gaps where the media outlet couldn’t get its own coverage.

So, could a blogger pick up an AP feed and write their own comprehensive news? Perhaps, but only as a full-time job (on which more shortly). And even then, are they honestly versed in the intricacies of international libel law (to pick a particularly dangerous example)?

Even if this were to happen; even if a group of bloggers got together to collaboratively produce a news source, you soon run into problems of scale. Say it becomes a source of note, attracting millions of readers daily. That requires money to run, and it also requires that you settle on an editorial voice to suit those readers.

Guess what, bub. You just became mainstream media.

Economics

Some suggest that more popular bloggers may go full-time, existing on a system of Micropatronage.

Here comes the problem with that. At the sorts of levels we’re talking about to make this sustainable (kottke is looking for $30 per patron right now, for example), each individual “patron” is probably only going to fund 2 or 3 sites a year, if that.

Getting people to pay for web content is getting easier, but not that much easier. Divide the number of potential micropatronages by the number of sites who’d surely like to be sponsored, and you’re looking at a pretty small pot of money.

Micropatronage arguments often make mention of the Renaissance, and the funding of Michaelangelo. And therein lies an interesting tale.

Renaissance Patronage generally involved a single rich patron funding an exceptional artist. The numbers of patrons were extremely small; the numbers of artists who weren’t good enough was huge. We only know of a relative handful of artists who lived off patronage in this way. Thousands more couldn’t get the funding.

Here’s a slightly more likely, sustainable scenario. There are undeniably good writers out there, with entertaining, informative sites. Mainstream publishers are well aware of this. In fact, the cleverer ones have been inviting bloggers to write pieces for them for several years.

I think we’ll see two major shifts in mainstream media in the next decade:

1. Improved, smarter interactive offerings, including more reader participation. These may, or may not replace traditional newspapers, but that’s almost immaterial – they’ll be produced by the same groups.
2. The use of blogs as a way of assessing and recruiting writers; and possibly acquiring their sites as a way of boosting readerships.

After all, it would work rather well in terms of traffic acquisition. As a publisher, acquisition of a popular technology blog could make a powerful draw to your entire site. There’s no huge change in your operating model – advertise carefully, and pay the blogger a staff fee for maintaining it.

So I’m prepared to envisage blogs being drawn into mainstream media offerings. Perhaps the right networks of bloggers may even be able to collaborate to form new mainstream media “hubs”.

The personal publishing boom, then, is undoubtedly interacting already with mainstream media. It will almost certainly affect it, and be affected by it. But it won’t be the death of it.

So, this is really Not A Damn Blog?

I like writing; I have done since I was a kid. Occasionally, people even like reading what I write. Or at least pretending they do…

And yes, this site certainly interacts with, and is built using tools from the “blogging phenomenon”.

Perhaps my continuing avoidance of the “blog” label is just inverse elitist snobbery…

hitherto stamps feet
hitherto: I don’t wanna be a blog. I’m special

… But I honestly don’t think so.

I don’t want to label my own little corner of the world with a word which is flat ugly in every way. And I can’t ally myself under that label with a culture which too often seems almost gleeful in its attempt to declare its place in history before history is ready to judge.

Hell, if I wanted that I’d join the UK’s Labour Party.

Blogs have given us good, and bad. It’s a social good that anyone can publish more easily online now, as long as the flipside is accepted: way more dross to wade through. It’s good that at least the role of the media is cursorily examined in the light of blogging, even if that does lead to unfortunate hyperbole.

But me, I’m happy to keep putting together a diary and a loose archive of writings.

Not a damn blog.