I’m waiting for the bloglash (blogger backlash).

Why?

Well, having been – in a tepid way – through the entire Internet boom/bust/rebirth cycle (been with the Web since Mosaic – so that’s 10 years; been with a couple startups), the blog cycle is feeling the same way.

I started blogging just under two years ago; I saw the appeal immediately, but then I got busy at work again….

My “real” blogging — a somewhat consistent blog — has been only the last few months, but I have been following it all.

Blogs are reaching critical mass, and that’s both a good and bad thing.

Good: It’s good because it is a new medium, as the Web was (is?). It’s getting some of the attention it deserves – and this will help it mature. (Bring in new people, new ideas, just the mass of users helps it.)

Bad: At the same time, blogs are getting way more attention than they deserve. That’s not a slam, it’s just that this is its “15 minutes of fame” where every paper etc. writes/talks about them — it is reaching the masses. After this overexposure, there will be a backlash and then it will settle into some sort of normalcy, much like the Web has (you don’t have to like the way the Web has settled; I also fully agree that there is a lot of untapped potential out there, some of which is currently under investigation…). The backlash is coming; very soon now.

OK, what are the signs of the impending backlash?

Basically, the backlash will be a reaction against hype. Overexposure.

In the same way that people got sick of every commercial on TV suddenly proclaiming “See our Web site at blah.com” and companies like “balls.com” getting buttloads of VC money, people are going to start getting sick of hearing about how “blogging will be a seismic event in journalism; there is no turning back” (yeah, I made up that quotation, but I bet you could find one close to it somewhere).

Anything that gets hyped the way the Web was – and, increasingly, blogs are – will suffer a setback, a backlash.

Ironicially, I wrote about this quirk of human nature (at least American humans) re: the Google purchase of Pyra etc. Before, Google was the white hat, the good guy, the cool kid in class. Once it started maturing, it – essentially the same company – turn into another Evil Empire.

This will happen to blogging itself shortly, once the buzz has gone on so long that all people can hear is a buzzing in their ears.

They’ll turn. To the next ‘Net meme. (*shrug*)

Signs of hype:

• Academic acceptance: Hell, the Dean of Bloggers (Dave Winer) pulled up stakes and moved from the Golden State to Beantown to teach at, of all the uncreditable places, Harvard. This isn’t Smalltown Junior College offering a blogger course for English credit.
• Interest by companies outside the industry: This goes back to Google’s purchase of Pyra (blogger/blogspot). Yes, both are Internet properties, so it’s not like Mobil Oil purchasing a restaurant chain, but there is a degree of separation. Userland or Moveable Type merging or either partnering with Pyra would have been interesting but in a “so what?” kind of way; Google purchasing Pyra raised eyebrows, increasing the visibility of both companies in everyone’s eyes.
  
• Mainstream press latches onto story: Yes, of course the stories will be clueless in many cases. Hey, so is a lot of popular science writing – gross oversimplification to help get a point (often an incorrect one) across. Whatever. The mainstream press – NY Times and its ilk – is starting to catch a whiff of this blogging thing. Oh, they’ve (their more intrepid writers) been well aware of this phenomenon for some time, but until now it was not worth writing about. The unwashed masses didn’t care… All of the sudden, it’s on the News Radar.
  
• Proponents are overwhelmed by the task: I’m reading more and more about how established bloggers are getting overwhelmed in some way or another by the Herclulean (sp?) task of keeping up with this all. Concerns about keeping up with the e-mail users send to the blogger to even people concerned about filters on the blog search engines/aggredizers (they want them; not a censorship issue), so they can be more easily used to target what’s interesting (to that user).
  

The main problem with all this attention is that nothing is good enough to make all this attention valid.

This was part of the problem with the Internet: It didn’t turn water into wine, it didn’t make you look 10 lbs. thinner, it didn’t whiten your smile.

The ‘Net was a new tool; a cool tool.

Not THE tool.

Ditto for blogs.

But now the momentum is beginning, and it’s going to change blogging forever. That’s not a bad thing, by the way – change is good, and blogging is so new it has not really found its role(s). We are entering into the shakeout period, where we find out how valid some of the claims are (my “seismic event in journalism,” for example), what ways this new(ish) tool can be leveraged.

There are other parallels between the rise of the Web and the rise of the blog, as well. Some valid, some just…well, interesting:

• Humble roots: Whether you want to talk about the actual concept or the tools used to create either the Web or blogs, it’s an effort of a small group of individuals/collaborators. Nobody (until Google/Pyra) was tossing money at blog folks to do stuff; Tim Berners-Lee wrote HTTP just to share documents. Mosaic was a grad school project. They did it because it was interesting and worth doing. Free tools abound; people share ideas.
• Supposed to “democracize” things: Yeah, what “things” are depends on who you talk to. And while the Internet has done this to a degree, and blogs also give the individual a voice, it’s not the great leveler people rant about. Sorry. It can be, but rarely is. (Note: In those rare cases where it does allow a single voice [person/group/cause] to rise above the institutions, it can be quite compelling. Very compelling.)
  
• Not sure of role, despite the “democracize” thing: The Web is still feeling its way around on this one. Since it was hyped – and funded – to basically be all things to all people all the time, it is struggling to figure out how much of that it can really fulfill. Yes, tough row to hoe. Blogs are more targetted, as they are content (not marketplaces, not applications [ASP], not brick-and-mortar killers…). Still, content…how? And why/for what? And for what else? Interesting questions for ‘Net and blogs.
  
• The ability for anyone to publish can be a less-than-compelling benefit: Yes, early Web pages were silly, often stupid, usually useless. Ditto today for blogs. I’ve stated my opinion on this one before: Bloggers are, for the most part, navel-gazers. On the other hand, so what? And why not? But just because you can publish does not mean that you should, or that it’s necessary. That’s another great lesson of the Web: While I maintain that every company (with limits) should have a Web site – like a Yellow Pages ad – there is no need to have it robust. Three pages: Page one welcome basic info (phone, address, e-mail); page two “about us” (some on page one, as well); page three whatever works for the company. Price list. Areas of specialty. Portfolio links. Awards won. Whatever. I have a blog; don’t need one. But I like it, and I do it. No one reads it. I keep writing into it. So what???
  
• About Itself: Yes, the early Web was filled with dross, navel lint and a lot of pages to help you code, set up a server and so on. Closed loop, in many ways. A Web about the Web. Blogs are similar, but breaking out more quickly (because they are content). While blogs point to other bloggers (vs. CNN/whitehouse.gov etc.) more than other types of sites – a kind of closed loop – this has rapidly changed (OK, over the two years I’ve read blogs…). As noted above, bloggers are starting to even be concerned about filtering blog search/collection areas so they can get to what they want (“You want politics with that?”). This is a very healthy sign. This type of attitude will 1) Meet with resistance (what “change” doesn’t?); 2) Promote initial eye-rolling; 3) Promote progress. My guess…
  
• West Coast Phenomenon: I don’t know where blogs were invented. I know that the ‘Net was not invented in California – HTTP at CERN in Geneva, TCP/IP East Coast/BBN, Mosaic Champaign/Urbana IL etc… – but the Net has been embraced on that chunk of America that’s spozed to float off into the Pacific some day. However, like the “About Itself” point above, blogs have done better to move beyond The [Silicon] Valley than the ‘Net has. BIG in NYC, for example, but this is for two interesting (to me…) reasons:
  

  • NYC tried very hard – because of its publishing roots, which were “threatened” (?) by the Web – to make a Silicon Alley in NYC. So the folks were/are there.
  • As noted somewhere above, blogs are about content (not technology per se). Content capital of US of A is NYC. The intelligensia is there. Bingo.

Dan Gillmor points out a newspaper interview with SBC’s chairman Ed Whitacre.

Dan says, among other things, the following: “Is there a more arrogant corporate chief in American [sic] than SBC Communication’s Ed Whitacre? ”

I don’t know, reading the article I was more struck by the man’s (Whitacre’s) ignorance.

He’s commenting on the February 2003 changes to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 — the most important telecommuncations actions since the 1996 act. And Whitacre is the head of the one of the three monster telecom companies (along with Verizon and one other – I’m not certain) — and SBC is probably the biggest.

Whitace’s response to a reporter’s question about the February changes?

He’s the head of the largest telecommunications company in the country and he has not read the order yet? He bases everything on a two-page summary? Agreed, he’s a busy guy, but come on….

And at the same time he spouts that the order is “terrible” he admits he has not read it.

Not exactly a creditable response, to me.

OK, Dave Winer leaves The Valley for Boston (Bah-ston).

Google still under MS-like attacks (too many to link.WTF?)

The Browser Wars are back (OK, sorta…)

Sunspots???

Google has been in the news a lot lately, and that’s not necessarily a good thing (for them).

Basically, due to recent business moves — some that have positioned them, in some eyes, in a threating pose — Google has drawn shall-we-say “interest” from the media and, especially, blogSpace regarding the following three areas (in order of importance, I’d say):

• The acquistion of Pyra, the owner of blogger.com and blogspot.com – There is more speculation than anything about this move, with the pessimists saying they will crush all blogging opponents like MS did to Netscape in the browser market, the optimists just saying “All is well, Sergey will keep it steady…”. Basically, the discussions right now are just speculation. Which, while fun to read, are just that: speculation. We don’t know if this purchase will be a good thing for the Web/blogging/technology in the short or long run. We don’t know. But that’s not preventing some from questioning the purity of Google’s motives. Whatever.
• Google has announced some advertising opportunities for bloggers – This has been roundly criticized thus far, but — as far as I can tell — it’s not something that one has to have on one’s Blogger-based site. It’s a choice, from what I read, it just gives bloggers on Google-owned sites the ability to put them out there and make money if they want. And even if Bloogle does end up forcing users to host ads (even the subtle Google ads), people 1) Have the right to leave, 2) Have to remember that Blogger is free (as in beer). Doesn’t the company have a right to make some money?
• Trademark wars – Yeah, some brilliant Google lawyer sent a letter to an Internet “word watch” site, telling them that the verb “to google” was an infringement on their trademark blabby-blah-blah. *sigh* Yes, I see Google’s point; I understand the frightened nature of the blogerti to this move. It is a very corporate move, which has not been Google modus operendi (sp?). But Google is getting bigger; get over it. There are pluses and minuses. This is a definite minus, but at least it was resolved (some additional text to show that Google is a trademark, ich glaube) in a low-key, out-of-court manner. Sony lost the right to the Walkman name by not doing this sort of follow-through, so I can’t really fault Google beyond my naive hope that, as Rodney King said, “can’t we all just get along??”. Yeah, I don’t like it; I see where it’s necessary to some degree.

OK, lots of speculation, quite a bit of business-type news (lawyers, ad revenue).

The undercurrent I’m sensing in reading a lot of articles and /. remarks is that things are progressing in a fairly typical manner for the old US of A:

Google fit this to a T: Search engines have been around forever (relative to the Web’s age), but Google came in and in a very non-splashy, non-threatening way created a tool that quickly became the best of breed. And it didn’t try to do too much, at least until they had a really good handle on what was its bread-and-butter: Search.

And it did a lot of things correctly that made not only the common man like it, but those who were technically inclined: They had an “dot.com” flippancy (its Pigeon Rank April Fool’s release was/is a classic); they appeared to care about the geek – opening their API (for free…yes, and their interest as well…but who cared?); they expanded into areas that sorely needed the expansion, even if it was not apparent at the time (image search, the news section, now something with blogs).

They did a lot right, and little wrong. It was a fast, clean site that delivered accurate, targeted search results. It didn’t have obtrusive ads. It wasn’t a portal. You couldn’t get a “user@google.com” address. They were focused, and they became incredibly successful — and profitable, to boot. How about that?

But now the honeymoon ends.

Google is growing up; it is buying companies.

At the same time, it probably realizes more than the average geek that search algorithms have gotten better as time has gone by (both experience and faster hardware/software), and if it sits on its laurels, it will be left behind. Both Fast and Teoma are ready to eat Google’s lunch if it is lulled into complacency (use both via HotBot, my former favorite search site).

And yes, they are doing — they have to do — some corporate things to stay on top. Things are getting bigger, more complicated and so on.

At the same time, I’ve seen little in Google’s past – nor the very recent past – to indicate that they will be a “resistance is futile!” company.

If for no other reason than it understands that part of its appeal is its appearance — real or imagined, doesn’t matter: perception is reality — of the “cool tool”, of pro-user, of hanging onto the good lessons of the dot-com era (bring in bright people; give direction; get out of the way and let them work and have fun). This is vital to the appeal of Google.

Look at Microsoft. Like it or not, they offer some great tools (bought or built, doesn’t matter to the end user…). While it catches a lot of flack over security and other issues (licensing….), there are good tools there. Visual Studio is great. Visio (yes, recent purchase) is a very good tool that MS is actually making better (better DB integration – will it soon compete with ERWin?).

Yet MS gets slammed for everything. Because – in large part – they are top dog.

If MS offered the same products, same prices as today but trailed, say, Lotus/IBM (office apps) and Novell (networking), it would be a different story.

In America, we tend to kick our companies when they are up.

No, this does not mean that MS is great/innocent/whatever. It’s an example.

And if you believe a word — just a word — of that, compare MS to Google.

Google is not going down the same road as MS. Not going to happen.

For one thing, that road (monopoly, first mover) is closed. Second, Google doesn’t (yet?) have the war chest MS does. Third, things are different today. People have seen what a MS can do, what a Google can do. It’s partly market forces.

Will Google change? Hopefully.

Will Google become less user-centric? Probably. Name me a large, successful company that has not sacrificed some user/customer energy to support the growth of the company (can’t have everything at all times…).

Will Google become MS? Nope. Or — at least — hopefully not. It’s really not in the cards; it doesn’t fit. Apples and oranges.

But some general observations: Google vs. Microsoft (or why Google will not become Microsoft):

• Google brought in grown-ups (such as Eric Schmidt) to run the company; MS has been run by Mr. Gates since inception. (NOTE: This is partly due to the shift in the way things are mentioned above). That’s a healthy sign. Bring in suits to do the suits’ work; let the visionaries keep actually working, not going to meetings. Actually, Bill Gates’ stepping aside and letting Steve Ballmer run the day-to-day was (to me) a healthy sign for that company.
• Google has a history as a user-friendly company; MS has the opposite. Yes, MS delivers a lot (hold your flames; they do have end-to-end solutions and support; your call on if it’s worth squat or not), but not nicely. Google is currently in the position where it never really had to get hard-nosed with customers.
• Google is in services; MS provides services but only to support software sales. Big difference. Can’t compare.
• Google has (thus far) embraced change. MS tried to establish/define the changes. Different, again.

OK, I could go on for hours, and I just may in my mind.

But the bottom line is that Google is catching flack for growing up.

Right now, that’s unfair: Because we don’t really yet know what it has grown into.

I think not an MS-type corporation, but that it will be more corporate. Get over it.

And keep your eye on the Google and call them for every perceived misstep….

That, too, is the American Way.

I’ve noted before that CSS is frustrating at times, yet a great tool with great promise.

Of course, one usually notices the flaws, not the goodies. Here’s a message of both:

• Frustration: Yes, I should have checked and all that, but apparently — for what I’m aiming for (HTML 4.01 STRICT and CSS2), underscores are not acceptable characters in class/ID names. This is new to me. Very non-Unix, which the W3C seems to follow (with my support/understanding, mind you). Turns out that a class I had in this blog still worked fine, but failed the W3C’s CSS validation. I don’t want that. Ouch. Yes, should have tested earlier, but it was not that bad. But why is underscore “_” bad? Interesting.
• Great (promise): OK, I discovered that I screwed up, but thanks to style sheets — and good architecture (the classes affected on other sites limited only to the header and footer files. Trivial) — it was a quick fix. Would I have rather NOT had to fix it? Sure! But did the entire nature of style sheets vs. content make this a billion times easier? Yep.

End of rant…

OK, I think Blogger’s Sunday, 02/23/2003 update introduced some weirdness — my name no longer appears in the “posted by” byline.

Normally, I’d say this was my fault (as I recently introduced new template code), but it doesn’t even work if I used the exact code they supply in the example on the template page.

I tried the nickname, as well, and that did not work either. (Yes, I have a nickname registered…)

NOTE: The archived pages — all of which I also regenerated with the new code — are fine. Except for the set I just regenerated now as a test; they have the same byline issue.

No note of this on the blogger status page, as of yet. Oh well…

[Update about a half hour later: Of course, after I have submitted an issue to Blogger and then gave it one more try, all was well. Without touching the template, as well. So it was on their end. I don’t know if there was a setting they had to flip on my blog that they did when they received my message (doubtful) or a site-wide thing. Either way, all better now. Republished the block of archive that I had tested, and all is well again.]

One of the drawbacks to blogging that I’ve discovered is that it takes away precious coding time.

Beyond the normal use of the HTTP and SMTP protocols, there are only a couple of things that I do regularly on the computer: Code and, over the last couple of years (in a very sporadic nature, mind you), blog.

So it comes down — in any given keystroke — what is one to do? Crank code or create content?

While not a big concern for many bloggers – who are writers only – it is a big issue, I would think, for many others. Face it, a lot of the popular bloggers out there were already known for code work (for example, Dan Bricklin, creator of VisiCalc about a million [Internet] years ago. And, of course, there is Dave Winer, a developer and Blogerati).

So there is a choice that needs to be made.

On the other hand, there is always the interest in keeping a rounded personality (as if coding AND blogging will turn one into a Renaissance man/woman…)

Oh well..

From the Department of Who Gives a Rat’s Ass Department:

• As mentioned in last entry, the Blog This! (my blog) portion of this site has been updated, style only. Basically, template modification. Good. Still a ways to go, but now it looks like it belongs to the site (littleghost.com)
• I rewrote many parts of the quotation section on Geistlinger.com’s quote section. On of the issues was to highlight text that had been searched on — this is relatively trivial in CF (Cold Fusion), if you ignore case. However, if you want to maintain case found in the searched text — and ignore the case of the keyword/keyphrase entered, it gets more difficult. Example: Search for “site” in all fields. It may be found as “Site,” “site,” “SITE” or whatever — and the CF replace function will replace all three with keyword: “site”. I want to preserve case in the search fields, while at the same time highlighting them. In PHP and Perl this is trivial (note: finding this trivial solution is not-so-trivial). In CF, it does not appear possible. So I had to write a custom tag that does it — good exercise, it works and works well, but it shows CF’s relatively lack of robustness. Essentially, the custom tag has to loop through the text, find the (case-insensitive) test, keep the left, apply a style to the mid (keyword/phrase) and then keep going. NOT as efficient or clean as a regular expression that does it.

Well, I’ve finally gotten around to changing the base template for this blog to more closely match the rest of the site post-redesign.

Tweaks to come; it is vastly improved, I think…

[Couple of hours later]

Yeah, of course I hosed some settings during the republishing process, and had to redo a style sheet.

I don’t know, I really like CSS but it is limiting in some ways.

For example:

• Having worked with tables for years, I know all the ins and out there. DIVs just don’t work as well, in many cases. Example: Say you have a two-column display, and you want (short) column 1 to have a red background, and (longer) column 2 to have a white background. With a table that’s easy — the longer column pulls the short one down with it, and one set’s the background color (in whatever fashion you want: bgcolor= or CSS) in the TD tag. With a DIV, it behaves much like an image: The color ends in the short column when column 1’s contents are done, and then column 2 begins to wrap around the bottom of column 1. Yes, but messing with position you can fix the wrapping, but the color can only be handled by nesting the two divs in a parent div or setting a background color for page that will be column 1’s — the short column’s — color. Just very awkward.
• It’s probably [yeah…] my ignorance, but is there a way to extend IDs like classes for pseudo-ID’s. For example, the class “smallText” can have link properties by appending the class name to a new pseudo-class: A.smallText:hover blah blah… I can’t seem to get the same to work for IDs, and I don’t see anything about it.
• Style sheets are a lot like HTML: Very easy to learn, cool that it works, but very hard to master. There are very subtle things going on that, when one first begins, one invariable hoses. It’s a neat tool, however, don’t get me wrong.
• There is no equivalent. That hurts. Sure, one can do a DIV ALIGN=center, but that really doesn’t do the same thing in many cases. I think part of it is that I’m still in the old HTML mode (tables etc), so it’s not intuitive and all. But it seems like more work to, for example, to center a search box over a page, one has to used two DIVs: One to center the box, the other to create the box. With a table, you do an “align=center” in the table (which did not affect the table contents). That’s not the end of the world, but that means that — for every style sheet you write — you have to “build” a fake center tag (ID with width auto) so one can use it. Maybe I’m just missing something, but the CENTER tag is a good one that should be build in.
• And – needless to say – the differences in browsers makes CSS a pain in the ass. And I’m not even counting browsers like Netscape 4.x, which barfs on all this stuff. I’m talking about so-called “standards compliant” browsers. Fortunately, things are SO MUCH better than they used to be in this respect. Now it’s more of stabilizing the code instead of writing two/three sets of it.

All that said, I love CSS. It’s great to quickly update the look and feel of site with one file in most cases (sometimes have to add class/id info to links or whatever).

For example, I hosed my update up because I had link color issues (that’s another rant, but whatever….). But once I identified the problem, it was easy to just extend a couple of classes and I was in business. Very simple.

That’s powerful.