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September 11, 2003
Weblog typology
Tom Coates has a great article on "(Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything...". Tom makes some good observations about the rise of micro, personal, bottom-up, indie-driven media. Blogs are the four-track tape decks of the online world (now that even bedroom guitar strummers use Pro Tools these days). Tom makes a point--almost as an aside--about standardizing on structures that really grabbed me.
"There's not a lot of difference between weblogs and homepages in some respects. Both are spaces to put written content online, for one. But the fact that homepages had no sense of standard structure, required manual updating, were unbound from time and were resolutely non-discursive meant that they were static, lumpen. ... The simple addition of structure and mechanisms for ease of publishing have made the comparable form of expression on weblogs so fluid and quick that it borders on speech."
I like this observation about the addition of "structure" as the key difference. I've said elsewhere that for all the fixation on "structure" by IAs, we usually aren't able to really get emotional or excited about structure the way "real" architects do. But this is a case where I think we should. The "standard structures" that Tom values in weblogs (which I suppose include chronology, permalinks, commenting, and aggregation) are beginning to coalesce into a typology. That is, these structures appear across platforms, contexts of use, and vendors.
Tom's comment reminded me of what Malcolm McCullogh wrote about typologies in an article for Archis magazine (much of which he also presented at Doors 7):
"The more resilient the formal type has been amid changes in society and technology, the more power it accumulates as a basis for design. Type is not a mere functional category in this regard, but a generative abstraction, an implicit balance between convention and invention and a living expression of cultural memory. ... The often-mentioned beauty of [Amsterdam] does not arise from the contention of so many free-form inventions, but from the subtle inflection of a concise repertoire of workable architectural types. Now generalize from this: a culture's perennial spatial forms reflect and perpetuate a particular cognitive background. Articulating the value of that background's uniqueness has become a topic for interaction design."
Malcolm's speaking about architectural types that have had hundreds of years to formalize, and which are clearly richer and more complex than say, permalinks, although some of the appeal of types is their simplicity. (And incidently, "types" seem to me slightly different than Alexander's "pattern languages". Types are more about tangible structural peices and less about a strategy for using them.) Clearly inflecting the typology of weblogs has become a topic for interaction design.
Matt Haughey and Barry Parr have both been wrestling with the typology of wikis, which seem to suffer from a lack of a "concise repetoire" of workable types that fit with other areas of interaction design. As Barry writes "Because wikis date back to the earliest days of the Web and because they are based on a doctrine of extreme simplicity, and probably because there are so damn many of them, they have largely ignored everything we've learned about building Web sites in the last near-decade." (This is pretty much true of Manila/Frontier as well.)
Posted by Andrew at September 11, 2003 08:13 PM
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I think the problem with Dave Winer's work (especially Radio Userland) is that he does it all in Frontier, and it's not the best programming language for what he's trying to do.
It's a classic case of "when the only tool you have is a blender, all your problems look like frozen daquiris."
But, you're right that he has missed a revolution or two in the last couple of years.
Posted by: Barry Parr at September 12, 2003 08:36 PM