Entries tagged “blogs”

About seven years ago, Matt Haughey, Paul Bausch and Meg Hourihan ran a very cool early blogging community called Blogroots, which acted as watercooler for conversations about the evolution of the then-nascent medium.

I'd found some links to the site in the Web Archive a few months ago, and sent them around, and then was delighted to see one of them surface on its own again today. Gawker Media's Erin Pettigrew used the initial thread about the launch of Gizmodo (Gawker's first title), along with my post at the time as a jumping-off point for a look at Gawker's success seven years later. I'm a big fan of using the history of our blogs as a record of the lessons we've learned over the years, and I'm glad I wasn't (overly) harsh about Gawker's chances.

As far as advertising on blogs goes, though, I'll admit I've become a bit of a convert to the potential. Today's conversation prompted a quick glance at the numbers for the biggest blog advertising platforms in the U.S., revealing something kind of interesting:

Not too shabby, considering it's only been a little over a year since Six Apart Media launched. Another little trivia note — that first Gizmodo design, which inspired such an interesting conversation, was designed and implemented by Mena and Ben Trott, working as sort of an ancient ancestor of today's Six Apart Services. It's fun to see that everybody involved is not only still blogging, but succeeding at it.

A few brief thoughts upon the announcement of Amazon's Kindle ebook reader:

• Given that even my most skeptical friends have literally been desperate for ebooks for years now, there's definitely demand for such a device -- the question is whether all the pieces are in place, and whether regular people agree with us geeks.
• The choice of EVDO over wifi is very telling. I travel a lot, so I'm keenly aware of exactly how far wifi has to go to become really ubiquitous. And even the many places that wifi is available are tangled up an a complicated set of different payment and access schemes. Bundling access through an EVDO network that "feels" free is one of the most interesting parts of the announcement. Odd that they branded the network as "Whispernet", unless of course they plan to use it for other things in the future.
• I don't think they should be charging for blogs that are distributed to Kindle users. Obviously, I have a dog in this fight, since I've wanted a dedicated blog reading-device for years, but I don't even think it's got the potential to be a great business for blog publishers. Having blog content be free would be the perfect gateway drug to Kindle usage.
• I was really unsettled by the specificity of Robert Scoble's April Fool's joke about such a device, since it ended up being very accurate. On the other hand, I know that there are bloggers who've known about the Kindle, in one form or another, for a year or so.
• The 10-minute video extolling the Kindle featuring Jeff Bezos and a dozen best-selling authors is perhaps the most visible evidence of just how much Amazon dominates the book distribution industry.
• The videos promoting Kindle also show that, though he might not have Steve Jobs' showmanship, Bezos seems to be perhaps the most articulate CEO of any of the big technology companies when it comes to explaining the benefits of his own products.
• They should kick-start the market by giving these out as free Wikipedia devices to schools. One per classroom.
• Distributing books through Whispernet and controlling their sale dodges a lot of the more obvious blowback that they'd get about DRM and monopolistic sales channels if they'd have chosen to use a desktop app like the iTunes store does. Smart, or lucky?
• Does the fact that books or other content have to be converted to MOBI format mean that they're eliminating the potential for Long Tail revenues from Kindle users? They say they've got 100 out of 112 best-sellers supported already, but isn't the killer app the books that aren't NY Times best-sellers?
• A five-thousand word cover story in Newsweek entitled "The Future of Reading"? That's perhaps the most impressive PR coup for a hardware device that I've ever seen. The story is pretty good, but even the iPhone wasn't greeted with that kind of reception. ("The Future of Talking"?)
• I love reading on my iPod Touch, and indeed, it's a better reading device than it is an iPod. It's a little too small to really curl up with, as one does with a book, but when I showed it to an acquaintance in the book publishing industry a few weeks ago, she understood how I could say it was a lot closer to the "right" ebook experience than anything that's been foisted on us in the past. It'll be interesting to see if Kindle continues that trend.

Update: D'oh! I forgot two of the main points I wanted to make:

• I should be able to get a Kindle client for my laptop, and then if I buy a book every other week, I get free EVDO access. Maybe I'd have to pay for a card, but Whispernet is a great service.
• Amazon Prime members should get a Kindle for free. Make that program actually offer some tangible benefits to members. And again, free Whispernet for Prime members would be killer.

In his post this weekend, Rex Sorgatz points out that "mainstream media is hard". It's a truth I know firsthand -- I used to work both in the music industry and at a newspaper, and still get the chance to work directly with the people at the largest media companies in the world who are bringing them into the modern era.

The thing is, I want them to survive the changes, and to thrive. I detest that there's such an adversarial relationship; This weekend a conversation with a veteran of the book publishing industry reached something of a breakthrough when we agreed that framing the ebook conversation in terms of DRM was like picking which Barnes & Nobles to stock books in based on how much shoplifting they see at that location. It's not about stealing -- it's about making fans happy.

Similarly, news can be about making worthwhile journalism that respects both tradition and contemporary life. So I was really, really happy to see Rex and Mike Davidson announce that MSNBC has acquired Newsvine. We usually talk about big companies acquiring little ones in term of the survival of the smaller company, but this may well be one that boosts the longevity of both organizations.

And more to the point, I love the conversations that I have with (or pick up from the blogs of) Mike and Rex because, like me, they're part of a large, somewhat quiet, number of us who truly love both old and new media. It's been a failing of both parties that people still talk about giant media corporations as dinosaurs, or that the giant corporations see new media like blogs as a threat instead of an opportunity.

As Mike points out in his post, MSNBC sites like Rising From Ruin really show off the potential for companies to combine the reach of traditional media with the emotional resonance of the best of social media. I've had the privilege of getting to watch the site mature from its launch the weekend that Katrina hit (it's a TypePad blog), and seeing how human the stories are on that site, compared to, for example, the manipulative and off-putting versions of similar stories that one might see on TV was really a gratifying example of how a big company can do social news right.

I'm hoping, too, that the new relationship will somehow mean I get to finally meet either Rex or Mike. Despite traveling in the same circles for years and having avidly followed their work for more than half a decade, somehow I haven't met either of these guys yet.

I'd intended to post a correction to this NY Times story's recounting of the history of blog book tours, but was pleased to see that my friend, and intermittent blogger, Jason Kottke has already done the legwork.

For my part, here's Greg Knauss' post on my blog from his seminal tour for Rainy Day Fun And Games For Toddler And Total Bastard. (Which book I still heartily recommend, by the way.)

And then two years later, I hosted Danyel Smith for a quick stop as she promoted More Like Wrestling. Since then, Danyel's gone on to return as Editor in Chief of Vibe. Sure, it's a role she's uniquely qualified for, but I like to think that having a brief stopover at my blog on her book tour was really what sealed the deal.

Daniel Lyons, author of the heretofore-anonymous Fake Steve Jobs blog, which comments extensively on companies in the technology industry, was also the author of Forbes' November 2005 cover story "Attack of the Blogs", a 3000-word screed vilifying anonymous bloggers who comment on companies in the technology industry. In 2005, I spoke to Lyons for the article, though the comments I made about both the efforts that have been made to encourage accountability in the blogopshere, as well as the many positive benefits that businesses have accrued from blogging, were omitted from the story.

My initial temptation was to mark Lyons as a hypocrite. Upon reflection, it seems there's a more profound lesson: The benefits of blogging for one's career or business are so profound that they were even able to persuade a dedicated detractor.

First, some background. Attack of the Blogs attracted a good deal of blogosphere attention when it was originally published; It's difficult to overemphasize exactly how strident and one-sided the piece is. Some excerpts to give you a sense of the tone:

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.

...

The online haters have formidable allies amplifying their tirades to a potential worldwide audience of 900 million: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, plus a raft of other blog hosts. Google is the largest player; its Blogger.com site attracts 15 million visitors a month, more than each of the Web sites of the New York Times, USAToday and the Washington Post. An upstart, Six Apart in SanFrancisco, owns three blogging services--TypePad, LiveJournal and Movable Type--that together run a strong second to Google.

With that mention of my employer, I have to begin the disclaimers. I obviously have a vested interest in preventing people from maligning blogs -- much of my career, and indeed the bulk of the work of my adult life, has been in helping promote opportunities around things like blogs. In addition, I spent a good deal of time on the phone with Lyons for the story, expressing in detail the steps my company had taken to encourage responsible blogging, and instead saw the second paragraph I quoted above, which implies that we somehow benefit from providing services to "online haters".

(To those who'd snipe that I'm only upset I didn't get quoted -- I don't have any interest in getting quoted in lazy, sensationalistic stories. And my points of view were more than adequately voiced by peers I respect, such as Jason Goldman and Frank Shaw.)

The deliberate antagonism of the story was especially frustrating to me because Six Apart, more than any other company involved in blogging, has taken its lumps for its advocacy and efforts around accountability and responsibility. We'd been taken to task years ago by the old-school blogging community for efforts like TypeKey, which provided authentication tools, and were derided by both bloggers and the media for encouraging any accountability for the tone and content of bloggers' words. At the same time, we've been maligned by stories like the Forbes cover for apparently not doing enough to encourage accountability, though I do take some pride (and offer a final disclaimer) in the fact that we host Forbes' blogs on our TypePad service, that Forbes offers the option of using TypeKey to authenticate comments, and that the content of the Forbes blogs is generally excellent.

The useful content of blogs like Forbes' highlights a particularly interesting bit of intellectual dishonesty in the original Attack of the Blogs story. Many of the examples of the most extreme negative behavior come from sources such as Yahoo message boards postings, vituperative emails, even abusive phone calls. Not to put to fine a point on it, but none of these are blogs.

So, should Forbes simply retract the story and issue a correction? Maybe so. Because the most dramatic oversight in the piece was that Forbes neglected its own editorial mission. I am by no means an advocate or supporter of the unalloyed capitalism that seems to be advocated by the magazine's editorial ideology, but I do think it's a position held in good faith, and so I can respect it. But Forbes professes to be an advocate for businesses and entrepreneurs, and by presenting blogs and blogging as a threat, instead of as the single most powerful new tool for improving business communications, the magazine does its target audience a profound disservice.

Which brings us to Fake Steve Jobs. There's no question Dan Lyons does great work under his pseudonym. The blog itself is a must-read, and the canny way the author's true identity has been managed was exceptionally effective at making the blog a breakout success. Since the New York Times outed Lyons, Forbes itself has wasted no time in claiming both the author and the blog as its own.

But the techniques and opportunities created by the success of FSJ illustrate perfectly the flaws in the original Attack of the Blogs story. The immediacy and extremely wide distribution of a blog make it possible to reach a large audience in a very short period of time. The blogosphere's lightning-paced mechanisms for promotion and amplification let the site attract buzz and attention from far outside of its core geek audience. The influence and connections of blog readers got the blog attention from the likes of Bill Gates, and yes, even (the real) Steve Jobs himself less than a year after its launch. And the business value generated was so obvious that Forbes.com compromised on its usually-staid editorial voice in order to include Fake Steve as part of its stable of blogs. And the blog was even hosted by the very same Google that "allied" itself with the "online lynch mobs", and will join those hosted by us who "operate with government-sanctioned impunity".

Blogs are such a good business tool that Forbes has given its most valuable editorial promotion to announce their adoption of one. This, from the magazine whose cover touted that "They Destroy Brands and Wreck Lives".

It makes sense to close with a quote from the story whose creation perhaps inspired Lyons to rethink his view on blogs after he'd completed it.

Google and the like argue they bear no more responsibility for content than a phone company does for slander over its wires. But Google's blog business looks less like a phone company and more like a mix of reality TV and an online magazine. Bloggers provide the fare, and Google maintains it for them free of charge, sometimes selling ads.

Google says ad revenue isn't the point. The real aim is "to let users embrace the Web as a medium of self-expression," a spokesman says. Google lets them run wild.

Dan, aren't you glad you got to run wild?

Some related links:

• The New York Times reveals that Dan Lyons is Fake Steve Jobs. Read to the end as John Markoff (through Brad Stone) not-very-subtly reveals the fact that he has Real Steve Jobs' IM handle on his buddy list.
• Attack of the Blogs, which helped inspire Mena Trott's speech about online accountability.
• An appreciation of an insightful perspective on FSJ by Caroline McCarthy of CNET.

I would just like to say thank you to all of you for supporting my site for almost 8 years now. This is an unbelievable honor.

How could I still give a damn about blogs, about the web, after all day, every day for eight years or so? Well, how could I not? Let me show you what it looks like to work with the most talented, most passionate people in the world.

That video is Mena making the announcement of a surprise trip around the world to Kristen, whose moving essay about reconnecting with her father won her and her friend each a trip to Paris, Tokyo, and San Francisco. As I asked on the sixapart.com site, "Ever change somebody's life?"

I haven't, but I work with a team that has. Mena's even captured an image of what happiness looks like. And while Mena and I are lucky enough to get to sometimes put a face or voice to the work that everyone on our team does, there are dozens of other people who are just as passionate.

I've been both delighted and touched by some of the other posts I've seen recently from my coworkers. Simon had written a brilliant news post on LiveJournal the other day, then stopped to reflect about the experience:

Because most of my coworkers came from the community I don't think they make the distinction between them and us that I think the community at large does. They get affected. Some of the comments users make hurt them. Deeply. Because I'm often on a different timezone to everyone else I've sat on the end of IM with people who can't sleep out of distress.

This is the flipside of The Cluetrain Manifesto that nobody talked about.

...

I'm a geek and a user and a customer and I'm passionate about the things that matter to me. And, amongst many other thing, LJ matters to me. I use it everyday. We use it for work. I feel a burning urge to make it completely awesome. I get defensive about it with other people. When I'm back in England and I'm talking to my (largely LJ using, nay OBSESSED) friends my eyes shine when I talk about it. I really want to finish search now because I've got a really, REALLY cool idea I want to prototype and get signed off which I hope will completely rock everyone's world.

And there's more. Steve is the tough-guy-with-a-heart-of-gold you might have seen at the end of our Six Apart Holiday Movie, explaining the "O RLY" owl on Blogs By Phone. He explains, for all of us, "this is why I'm here:

Today, though... I'm loving on THIS startup. Don't get me wrong, I'm usually loving on this startup, but today it moves me. I love that I work on a product that would move someone to write this, and that I work for a company that would reward such an action with this (those last two links are very much worth clicking on). I know I'll get half a dozen private messages or IMs from people telling me what a fucking cornball I am, but I don't really care. I'm very proud and happy to work here and be part of what Six Apart does, both in terms of innovation and technical achievement, and personal connections and relationships.

I think, just a few months ago, I was burned out on the trappings of Web 2.0 and all that crap. I had wondered for a minute, "Is it the work?" I knew I love the company I work for, the people I work with, and most of all the community we serve. I really feel like LiveJournal, TypePad, Movable Type, and TypePad kick all kinds of ass. But maybe I had just gotten tired of it?

And what I realized is that the distractions of being around people who weren't like my coworkers, who weren't just regular members of the community, is what was stressing me out. Paying too much attention to pundits and people who don't give a damn about the web, who weren't passionate about this medium, was what had made me dissatisfied. Part of the solution, for me, was presented when I had the chance to be a little physically distant from that environment. As much as I (already!) miss sitting in the office with my fellow Six Aparters, being in New York already feels like a breath of fresh air, or at least differently stale air, when compared to going to lunch South of Market and hearing someone nattering on about podcasting.

But mostly, what I missed was showing people this passion. We had a party the other night with many Six Apart employees in attendance. And I was lucky enough to get the chance to thank them for being not just an inspiration to me in the work that I do, but in making something profound, making something meaningful just like I'd been hoping for. To thank them for having the passion to eat, sleep, and breathe this sometimes thankless and difficult work.

But in addition to helping so many others, they've also blessed me with the ability to share that gratitude with the world in a simple, direct way. I don't know of anybody else outside our company who loves their job and the work they do the way that I do. So, apropos of nothing, on the anniversary of nothing, but just because we had a really good day, thanks to everybody I work with at Six Apart, and to the community that we've all built together.

Also, I just really love that video of the phone call with Kristen.

A few days ago, I foolishly described a table of my blog archives as my favorite view of my blog. As with all posts that I only spend 30 seconds writing, it got some good responses that really showed how little thought I'd put into the whole thing.

First, Tim Bray offered some good feedback on what he called The Dash View. I should quickly point out that lots of people, including me, have used this kind of display years and years ago. I've also had it on my current sidebar as my archive list for months. So I'm not pretending that it's any kind of innovation, just something neat to look at. Tim improves upon the design by listing his posts by month along with a count of the number of posts.

Jackson Miller followed up with some useful points as well, and Mark Bernstein muses some more about the name (I used to call my daily links "Dash Bored") but his closing point is the most interesting one:

Chronological access is literally geeky: we're exploring it because we can, not because it's useful. It's far more useful to provide good topical access, and still better to link things together. But if dates are what you have, then it's better to represent and use the dates than to treat your archives as fish wrap.

I've found a much better date-based organization of blog info: Ryan's got a year in review post that helps me remember just how eventful 2006 has been for me, too.

Rex has compiled a fantastic list of the Best Blogs of 2006 that You (Maybe) Aren't Reading. I'm flattered to be mentioned as a see-also suggestion, but mostly I'm just happy that someone has created such a list and that it's well-done. Not surprising, given that Rex is the king of lists, and maybe I won't feel so bad about the fact that I haven't gotten around to doing one of these myself.

Update: The fellow who asked the question actually doesn't want to participate in the lawsuit against Cohen. Wonders never cease!

On Ask MetaFilter a month ago, a question from the friend of someone who was ashamed by the things he said on camera while being questioned by Sasha Baron Cohen in character as Borat:

Last year, a guy came to my town claiming to be filming a documentary for Kazakhstan. He recruited my friend John to be in it. John signed the papers and everything- that's not the issue. However, the producers got John really drunk and he said some things he really regrets that made it to the final cut. John's terrified that everyone's going to see the movie and think he's an awful human being (which he's not). He's very distraught.

My own answer to the question was marked as one of the best answers.

John doesn't need to be terrified that people will think he's an awful human being. He should work on accepting that some large number of strangers, and small number of acquaintances, will think (correctly) that he has poor judgement or can say offensive things when he's drunk.

He needs to first make sure everyone he cares about is aware of exactly what he said, the context he said it in, and his true feelings on the topics being discussed. He then needs to proactively contact the appropriate campus authorities to let them know of the incident, along with the fact that he's remorseful -- don't let them make him a scapegoat for any brouhaha that pops up.

If he wants to go the extra mile, he should send a succinct, contrite letter of explanation and apology to the capmus [sic] newspaper, or ask for space in the paper to write, and acknowledge that he'll get some deserved grief.

There was a lot of great discussion in that thread, much of it centering around the fact that people have personal responsibility for the things they say, especially when they say them on camera in a major motion picture. And then, in the news on Friday:

Two unsuspecting fraternity boys want to make lawsuit against "Borat" over their drunken appearance in the hit movie.

The legal action filed Thursday on their behalf claims they were duped into appearing in the spoof documentary "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan," in which they made racist and sexist comments on camera.

The young men "engaged in behavior that they otherwise would not have engaged in," the lawsuit says.

Well, sure, you could sue the filmmakers, but then you're just drawing attention to your own poor judgement. This is also one of those great examples of how blogging means that almost all of us are only one or two degrees away from almost any news event. I'm sure there are already suits pending against people who've blogged the things that other people say when they're drunk.

Okay, you probably don't need to be told that spam is bad. But you might find it interesting to learn about the economy that's sprung up around blog spam. Good thing, then, that Charles Mann wrote an extensive piece for Wired detailing this scary new world. I'm quoted pretty extensively in the story and, for a change, I'm not entirely unhappy with how it turned out.

The emails, Dash believes, exemplify the fundamental difficulty in fighting splogs and Web spam. With the rise of pay-per-click advertising, the big search engines have, in effect, created a kind of currency: ranking in search results. Put up the right Web site, with the right collection of links and keywords, and – ka-ching! This cash is available to anyone on earth who can manipulate search engines' site-ranking systems.

Little wonder that the entire world's supply of spammers is trying to seize the opportunity. They are combing through the Net so assiduously that they are attempting to capitalize on individual blog posts about products that won't even appear for months to come. No single company, Dash believes, can withstand that much collective rapacity. As a result, he says, "there's going to be a reckoning with the economy that's building up around search engine rankings, one way or another." Something fundamental will have to change, either in the search engine world or the blogosphere, because things can't continue the way they are now.

Ian Kallen has a smart look at the problem as well, informed by Technorati's unique perspective. "The blogosphere has thrived on openness and ease of entry but indeed, all complex ecosystems have parasites. So, while we're grateful to be in a successful ecosystem, we'd all agree that we have to be vigilant about keeping things tidy. The junk that the bad guys want to inject into the update stream has to be filtered out. I think the key to successful web indexing is to cast a wide net, keep tightly defined criteria for deciding what gets in and to use event driven qualification to match the criteria."

I think we have to bolster Ian's recommendations with a big push for accountability, as well, though that's a difficult thing to achieve with mere technology. It's especially challenging given the folks who are on the other side; I found John Jonas's blog an interesting read. Jonas is one of the sploggers interviewed for the article, and seems like, at least in his offline life, he's striving to be a moral and devout guy.

That leaves us with the problem of accountability: How do we make individuals feel personally repsonsible for the web, in the same way that we hope they're personally responsible for the their surroundings in their physical community? Mann asked Jonas' partner whether he thinks about the impact of their work on the web, and elicited the response, "I'm just making my living. I guess I don't think about that kind of thing very much."

Three years ago, Nick Denton made a prediction: "Google text ads will give blogs a business model; but they'll also warp the format." It appears he was right.

I take it back, people do sometimes leave good comments. I'm thrilled with the comments on "A Malcolm and a Martin", as well as the conversations on other sites:

From Scott Berkun: (Buy his book now!)

My position is that you need attention to have influence, and radicals can bring attention to an issue that is being ignored. But there are other ways to get attention. You can earn it from people who learn to respect you for intelligent work you do, problems you’ve solved, or smart things you say.

Interestingly, I'd summarize a lot of Scott's argument as a plea for civility and accountability. Put succinctly, you catch more flies with honey. I don't disagree, I just think the honey-tongued are inspired by those with a gut full of bile.

From Timothy Johnson: (Buy his book now!)

In projects and in life, you need those people who will challenge the status quo with reckless abandon. And you need those people who will calmly assess the status quo against the proposed changes, analyzing and logically weighing the alternatives to provide solutions. It's about balance, but it's also about tension.

On another topic, my ramblings on Office 2007's big bet have indirectly led to my quotes in Information Week's piece on TransMedia. I like both hosted web apps and installed desktop apps, and think they complement each other well:

"Writely and Word each enhance the value of the other, but they're for completely different purposes," he writes via e-mail. "Kids in junior high write their papers in Word from the Student version of Office, so we're at best 10 years from the workforce including a significant number of employees who had their primary word processing experiences happen with an online app."

Dash says desktop apps continue to offer obvious benefits: the ability to work offline and responsiveness that's not dependent on the performance of distant servers or network traffic. Then there's the issue of trust.

"I think there's something a little deeper behind people's attachments to desktop productivity software," he writes. "Documents created in Word are often lengthy, involved efforts, ones that people put a lot of investment into. The combination of browsers and AJAX applications isn't yet a platform that most people trust."

Nick Bradbury had a great take on my Office post, too:

Usability is the most important feature of any application, and the improved usability of the new MS Office is by far its best new feature. I agree with Anil that Microsoft has made a risky bet by so radically changing Office's UI, and it's a bet that will pay off.

That post also had the side effect of putting me right under Microsoft for search resuls on "Office 2007". I really should do something with that, but I'm struck by the fact that, despite the marketing team's efforts to rebrand as the 2007 Microsoft Office System, this is still what people are gonna search for. Shouldn't you also be posting info under that name?

Anyway, it's not all butterflies and hugs, some of the feedback has ranged from "Who the hell calls software brave?" to Could you possibly be any more of a corporate sycophant? This is your life? I can't imagine why some people think the blogosphere is an unkind place. Sure, that's a normal reaction to a conversation!

Congrats to Robert Scoble on his new gig, and no disrespect intended to great MS bloggers like Dare Obasanjo and Niall Kennedy, but for my blogging dollar, the best blog ever published by a Microsoftie is Jensen Harris' Office UI blog. I'm not the first to note it, but I wanted to chime in with my vote there. Honorable mention goes to Ray Ozzie, who's infrequent, but then some of the very best bloggers are.

It helps that Jensen's working on Office 2007. (If they paid me, I might call it The 2007 Microsoft Office System, but they don't. Speaking of branding nazis, there's only one "e" in "Movable".) Office 2007 is the single most impressive and ballsy effort that Microsoft's put into anything since Word 6, which I think was the best desktop software application ever created.

I'll hopefully expand on these thoughts more when I've got a few minutes, but I wanted to throw that out there while I'm thinking of it. Commence flames... now!

(More evidence of Jensen's greatness: The phrase "Install the Send a Smile tool" appears in a post. Really, shouldn't we all install the "Send a Smile tool"?)

When I'm not able to be a good blogger myself, I rely on the kindness of others. Let's see what's out there!

Snarkout, one of the finest blogs on the web, has got some profound musings on technology, permanence, extinction, and language, all things that have been weighing on my mind lately. I'd like to point you to Kevin Kelly's thoughts, which form the jumping-off point for Steve's post and were wonderfully articulated, but the Times does not want that information to be archived forever. I am not sure if that's irony. But hey, there's audio. Those audio formats never become obsolete.

Hey, wait, permanence? Archiving of digital formats? Openness? You might have missed Mark Pilgrim's post, which pretends at first to be about Apple and data loss (he's right about those parts) but then veers into preparing for future archaeology. I think Mark's got his priorities wrong on some of this stuff, but I appreciate having a zealot on the side of good.

You need to have someone hold an extreme position to get even moderate change. The hard part about being an advocate for the extreme position is that people like to make fun. My feeling is that it's a pretty good sign if you stand for something strongly enough that people can mock you for it. Take a look at the guy sitting next to you -- do you know what he stands for?

I know what Mike stands for, cynicism with a soft, sweet heart. Mike takes a bold pro-sports stance, refuting the "all geeks hate sports" myth with a combination of righteous indignation and a little bit of history.

Oh hey, speaking of myths and facts, Steven Johnson seeks out the facts with an intellectual honesty that Lou Dobbs wouldn't recognize if it stole his job. I'm just proud of my valuable contribution to the discourse. I told you we boys like to leave comments.

And then, best for last, Bad Acts. I spend a lot of time doing public speaking; So far I've managed to create a PowerPoint presentation featuring Dr. Phil, a pair of handcuffs, an American flag, cliché kitty, the Enron logo, the phrase "OMG WTF" in 72-point font, a line graph in which both the X and Y axes are completely unlabeled, the Easter bunny, and Santa Claus. It should be pretty easy to work in a game of Assassin. I love my job. And I wish everybody on the web wrote as well as Skot does.

I sure do love words. And even better, my friends do too. So they make great websites and books about it. Mark made Neologasm, which I am very partial to because it documents (among other things) the words we regularly make up around the office at Six Apart. I am very glad to spend my days in a workplace that enjoys wordplay. But that's not enough!

So, I return to the classics, Double-Tongued Word Wrester, the excellent word blog by Grant Barrett, noted lexicographer and author of the upcoming Official Dictionary of Unofficial English. In addition to his linguistic expertise, Grant was my original influence in learning how to become an expert on a subject by loudly and repeatedliy asserting one's own overwhelming authority on a topic until others can't help but acknowledge one's genius. Though this isn't a rare tactic in the technology industry, particularly in the niche which I inhabit, it came as a revelation to me that this technique could be so effective. Witness it for yourself in Grant's history of Ask MetaFilter answers!

But blogs have a lot more to give to the worlds of etymology: There's the concept of the snowclone, the trope of performing a selective search and replace on a familiar linguistic structure. Besides being a favorite method of titling blog posts, it's one of the few new words whose etymology is completely documented. Language Log is a great resource; Its history of covering the "many words for snow" myth that gave snowclones their name is well documented.

Of course, blogs have a long history of being obsessed with words. The blog that is responsible for the word "blog", as well as having most directly inspired me to start blogging, has had a peculiar etymological fixation for some time. Bloggers are the new neologists, if not the new etymologists.