3-22-03 The Origin of this Web Log

Congratulations. As you might remember, I was trying to do the same thing with "essays.mindview.net" - keep the signal-to-noise ratio high by only having selected people post articles. But I've found it hard to either (A) get into the mindset of posting these things (B) figure out how to get other people to do it. I think the value of the experiment might be in figuring out the real issue, which is: "how do we generate interesting content for a site?" We could try to get other people to do it, but if the world does it the noise ratio is too high. And if I can't so far get myself to post on my own site, how do I post on yours? And vice versa - if I say I'll do something on your site if you do something on mine, then how do we find time for our own?

I don't think the problem is solved. As I think about it, if I had been productive I could have just continued posting using the Zope system I created, rather than needing a weblog setup (except they are better at handling feedback, although I do think that Joel Sposky's comments are probably quite germaine).

I suspect it may be something that requires a change in discipline, like doing exercise in the morning. Perhaps instead of answering our email, the first thing we should do in the morning is to get thoughts down on the weblog. The problem I have is that these thoughts are public, so must go through the editing and presentation process. I'm just not used to doing it this way, and haven't figured out how to change my mindset to do so.

But I'm still at the very beginning of the weblog process, and so am still adapting to the idea of "make all your thoughts public." I don't really know how to do it yet. The good thing about this conversation is that it's forced me to think about it. I think I've been so long in "article and book" mode, and recently much more in book mode (having decided that books are the best investment of my time. With the advent of the internet, computer magazines continue to dwindle), that this idea of much greater frequency is something that I will have to adapt to, as you say you've adapted to the O'Reilly weblogs. I think it requires a different mindset, and I think with your orientation towards making your website a publisher you've been thinking this way for longer than I have.

But because of our conversation this morning I've started having a glimmer of an idea about this. Let me see if it develops into anything on my own site, and if I can evolve it into something useful, and then I'll see if I can do something like you suggest (excerpts on artima, etc.). As you say, it's a different medium.

Based on our conversations, I tried an experiment with Zope. We've just upgraded to the latest Zope 2.6.0, and it has much more "content management framework" stuff, which often uses "structured text" (STX). We've also been maintaining the separate product, Chris McDonough's CMSTX document product, which allows you to easily use structured text. With structured text, you just type, put in spaces for paragraphs, and that's how it comes out, but if you want to add html it handles that too. This seems like the ideal medium for weblogging, since one can usually just type and not get distracted (much) by HTML. Setting up a weblog page took me about a minute, since it just involved creating and testing a CMSTX document. I find that even little hurdles can make something just a little too hard to do, so something like this makes me think again about web logging.

The only thing it doesn't have is feedback, but it's not clear to me that weblogs are about feedback, so I think I'll leave it as is for now and worry about feedback only if that seems to be essential.

My goal with this is an experiment to see if I can orient myself towards the idea of a regular (but public) diary, especially if I can hijack portions of my own emails to do so. This will be a challenge, because I've always resisted any kind of journaling. I took a journal workshop sometime in college ("Progoff Intensive Journal", I believe it was), but I resisted the idea of doing it because even then I had been writing for college newspapers for a couple of years and the idea of writing something that no one was going to read was not interesting to me. Of course, with those journals you were supposed to write all your deep secrets and the thought of letting someone else read such things would be inhibiting (I'm aware that some web loggers do just that for the world to see). However, I have enough daily thoughts and conversations of a technical nature and fit for public consumption that I think that it may be worth such an experiment. We'll see how it goes.