Thinkcorps

I got an email this morning from a friend, announcing a 4-part series he wrote that’s appearing on sfgate.com. He’s also started a blog, which unlike the advice you’ll get from thousands of bloggers, isn’t about the ‘conversation’ so much as it is about exercising/exorcising his own skills, ideas, emotions, etc. It’s a writer’s blog, treated writerly.

Now part of what makes blogging such a phenom is that you can do whatever you feel like, post whatever you want. There are no rules, save one, really—make it personal, make it reflect your passion. And yet—writing?! He’s posting actual stories, pieces he’s sat down and thought about, crafted and revised. I even have the evidence in a recent post where he destroyed his laptop after it crashed while in the middle of composing what i can only imagine was a lengthy post.

I suppose that it’s only natural to expect that the expansive population of blogs would reflect our own society, and our own individual contributions. The vast majority are going to jot, and only a select few will take the time to craft. But the Net is awash in information, and a jot adds only one tiny dimension to that original data point such that we need to compile several jots (or opinions) in order to sufficiently contextualize the data. So presently, we jot and jot, flushed with our new power to influence, and others code and code building tools to filter and organize the data and the jots. Once the tools mature, however, the jots will become just another data point—ones we won’t even see until enough of them coalesce into something large enough to be visible.
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So, two posts in the same day. I’m on a roll, dammit!

While I find it admirable that many bloggers are turning their blogs into for-profit ventures, it seems that the first thing to go are the standards once held so dear. Yesterday, RSS was the Holy Grail of information exchange, a platform for a grassroots revolution that promised to hose mass media down to its skivvies. Today, of course, there is money to be made, so f*ck RSS, let’s stick some ads in there!

The reason this bugs me is that there’s only one way to get an ad into an RSS feed, and that’s to surreptitiously embed it into an item’s description tag. This way, I can’t easily remove it and you’re more or less sure I’m going to have to see it (unless I have access to my reader’s code and a rudimentary understanding of regular expressions, of course). With such a simple action, the author creates a combative relationship with the reader. “Hey, jerk-wad, you’re gonna read this ad! You can’t avoid it! It’s all over the place. Bwah-Ha-Ha!”

It’s cruft, pure and simple. Boing Boing, popular champion of all things cyber, has attached little GIF text ads to their feeds. The ads are annoying and largely irrelevant (matching up advertiser and reader is still an inexact science, despite google). Boing Boing also prepended author names to their item descriptions, because, well, I think Joi Ito mentioned his reader didn’t support author tags. Total cruft! There are clear specifications for author tags. So those of us that with readers that can actually parse a feed correctly now have to see author names twice. Great. I can’t help but think that the Boingers enjoy the modicum of extra exposure.

I realize that RSS is especially vulnerable precisely because of its ease of use. But when our supposed champions go out and break it on purpose, for personal gain—well, I don’t see that road going anywhere good (tragedy of the commons, much?).