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Tale Torrent – Ye Olde Days of Weblogging

On Thursday 10th November, as part of Internet Week Europe, the awesome James Mitchell organised an event to celebrate individual stories about the web, called Tale Torrent: a night of true stories about the internet.

It was ace. It reminded me of the truly awesome Fray Day. We heard a variety of wonderful and deeply personal stories about the internet – a 25-year friendship from analogue to digital (entitled “Postcards ‘n’ mix-tapes, Skype ‘n’ status updates”) from Simon Sanders, to the joy of serendipity from Claire Burge; why Christian Payne (aka Documentally) treausres his network; to how World of Warcraft brought J Nicholas Geist’s friend out of his shell and onto a zombie pub crawl, amongst others.

I shared a story about ye olde days of weblogging – sparked by a post I wrote here last year.

And cos it’s about blogging, and this is my blog, I thought I’d share it here too:

 

I’d created my first webpage in Geocities c. 1997. I was putting off GCSE revision and noodled around with Microsoft Frontpage, then got curious about how the page was actually made, so started delving into HTML to see what that was all about.

(My first sites were everything you’d expect from 90s web design and more. Tiled backgrounds, scrolling marquees, animated gif under construction signs – the lot. Oh yes)

I started my blog in 2000. My friend Tom had been weblogging for a little while, and I kept sending him links and little nuggets for his blog. He suggested I just get on with it and start my own blog. So I did. Buying a domain back then was a pretty big deal. You deliberated over the name, and as I recall had to go through a fair bit of paperwork to get there. Not like today when most of us have domains coming out of our ears and you can get them for a few quid. And so, I bought kitschbitch.com, because I liked the name and it sounded snappy, bought some hosting and whacked together my new blog homepage.

Blogger really made the basic blog format possible. The above screencap is from the Wayback Machine – which turned out to be invaluable when prepping this story, as much of the references simply don’t exist any more. Or at least, don’t exist in the form I used to know them as.

I remember one of Blogger’s straplines – ‘Push Button Publishing for the People’. And it really was. You had to be able to code your own basic page, and insert the Blogger code in your template, input your FTP details etc. But then you were off. You wrote the blog post and hit publish and you were off – the WYSIWYG interface making links and basic formatting a doddle. Comments, permalinks, image upload and the like were all still to come – if you wanted to include an image in your blog post you had to upload it somewhere (usually to your own domain via an FTP client) and then insert the link manually. But you could publish a dated blog post, and the tool would create archives for you and everything. Magic.

On the date the Wayback captured the Blogger.com homepage in the screencap above, there’s a post from Ev thanking Blogger users for contributing to the Blogger server drive to keep the service going. Yep, this was before Blogger was acquired by Google, when they still needed a whip-round to keep it up and running as more and more users came on board. How times change, no?

 

Back when I started blogging, blogs weren’t usually ‘about’ anything in particular – they didn’t tend to follow a theme or specific area of focus. They were very personal – often a mix of links, stream of consciousness thoughts (much like Twitter updates nowadays) and diary based entries. Though I’ve since imported all my old Blogger posts into WordPress, I took a little walk down memory lane to look at some past posts in their original context. Sadly the images weren’t captured so you can’t see this post in all its hideous web design glory (the black and orange colour scheme was particularly vile, as I recall). It’s funny the things you remember. I remember writing this post, ‘You can’t be a hot bitch in a car with safety features‘, so very clearly. I’d still argue that cupholders and being a hot bitch are largely incompatible. The point was, that as weblogging was still a pretty underground activity, insofar as although it was completely public, the only people likely to see whatever you’d written were other bloggers. So it was very freeing – it felt like a really lovely place for idle musings, to find your own personal voice.

 

A later design.

 

Another one. This is from Oct 31 2002, the day after my 21st birthday. I blogged about being ‘officially grown up‘. I turned 30 a couple of weeks ago – and I still don’t feel anywhere near grown up. Oh, the things I would tell my younger self…

 

The UK blogging community was super small, super tight-knit – we all kept track of each other through the UK Weblogs updater and the Gblogs Gateway, created & curated by Darren Shrubsole & Jen Bolton respectively. A new UK blog being created was a Big Deal, as we all clamoured to know who’d joined our little club.

 

We’d keep track of blogs worldwide using Brig Eaton’s Eatonweb portal (which still exists, but now it’s on steroids). On the day captured (12th Mar 2000), there were a total of 1378 weblogs from across the globe listed. Can you imagine trying to list all the weblogs in the world alphabetically today?

 

In the absence of comments or permalinks, the way we responded to someone else’s blog post was to write our own blog post, and link to said person’s blog. And as ever, inclusion on someone else’s blogroll was very flattering. We didn’t have Klout or PeerIndex or Technorati, but we did track popularity using the Beebo Metalog. Slightly obsessively in fact. Updated by hand, and with love, this was the ultimate weblogging popularity contest of the time.

 

Because you didn’t want to lose momentum (and possibly your ranking on the Metalog), if you went away, you’d hand over the keys to your blog to someone else to guest blog for you. A lovely American blogger called Mark Olynciw who blogged at Riothero.com gave Tom & I access rights to blog there when he was on holiday. And we had a bit of fun – totally redesigning the whole page. I seem to remember a ripped male torso was the background image, and blog posts remarking on the distraction posed by one of the nipples following suit. It even made the front page of Metafilter, such was the small community of webloggers.

 

I think my favourite plaudit however was this one:

Goddamn those two are witty, smutty and vile. I love them. Like a stream of bat’s piss, they shine out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark

Never again will I reach such lofty heights. Might even put that on my CV.

 

It wasn’t that long however before the mainstream media started to pick up on this weblogging thing. This was a piece in CMJ music monthly (which I understood to be like the US equivalent of NME), which mentioned ‘the frequently hilarious kitschbitch.com’. Look Mum! I’m in a proper magazine in print and everything!

 

The Guardian did a piece a month or so later. No word of a lie, the day this came out was one of my first days settling in at university. I went into a meeting where our tutors welcomed the new crop of history students, to be met by an exclamation from one of them of ‘You were in the Guardian this morning’. Somewhat nervous as to why, it was a relief to find it out it was ‘just’ because of my blog – although by the same token this weblogging thing was starting to feel a bit more public than it had been. But as they’ve shown consistently, the Guardian got what blogging was all about from the beginning, and recognised the value in the different styles different bloggers adopted:

A weblog is, literally, a log of the web – a sort of frequently updated portal, where new entries go to the top and old ones drift to the bottom. It usually consists of the take of one editor – the weblogger or “blogger” – on the gems he or she has found online, either generally or on a theme. It sounds simple, and it is. Find one who shares your taste, and you have a surfing companion for life.

 

This Evening Standard piece gave us a bit of a laugh, given how they presented this blogging lark as strangely self indulgent and a fad that they couldn’t see would take off. I’m not sure they weren’t entirely wrong on the former, but as for the latter – well…

 

Though it was taking off as an ever growing phenomenon, in those early days, it felt like we all knew each other. The esteemed Dan Hon, then a Cambridge student and blogger of ‘The Daily Doozer’ had some cheeky fun creating ‘Blog Trumps‘, a kind of Top Trumps amongst bloggers. The original page is gone (thanks again, Wayback machine), but Tom’s post about the full set of Blog Trumps is still alive…

 

Here’s my card. My stock options were zero but my drinking abilities were duly recognised. As I recall whilst Ev beat most of us on the stock options front (somewhat prescient, given he’d later sell to Google & go on to found Twitter), and I didn’t even beat him on flair, my card highlighted my prowess in drinking. Ahem. I might not have your millions, Williams, but I can drink you under the table!

 

If the Metalog wasn’t enough, we started to get competitive in 2001 with the first annual Bloggies. Tom won the first of several Bloggies for Best European weblog. I was nominated, but apparently the ‘bitch’ part of my blog name was too controversial to be listed in full. Nowadays it’s big, professionally run blogs like Boing Boing and Lifehacker taking the prizes in the Bloggies, but back then it was just personal blogs, lovingly crafted and tended by individuals in their spare time.

 

The best bit about my blogging adventures, by a country mile, was the people I met as a result. On 11th June 2000, a few UK webloggers met in a pub in Kings Cross. It was still considered very weird to be meeting people from off the internet, and most non-bloggers thought we were nuts and clearly off to certain death at the hands of axe-wielding nutcases. We might have been a bit nutty but there were definitely no axes as far as I could see. It was quite weird, meeting people whose blogs we read. We weren’t used to talking to people in real life who’d read our online wibblings. We’d be chatting about something we’d done recently, or planning to do, and be met with ‘yes, I know’ and remembered that actually yes, although we’d never ‘met’ before, we all knew each other pretty well indeed already. Again, now we all have a collection of people we know ‘from the web’ and it’s totally standard to feel we ‘know’ someone we might not yet have met face to face through their digital presence. But not on that day. A bunch of bloggers met, in a pub, and had a jolly nice time – all photos courtesy of the awesome Giles Turnbull (full set here):

Dan, then of the Daily Doozer, now of Extenuating Circumstances, and now a Creative Director at Wieden & Kennedy in Portland

 

Tom, then of Barbelith, now of Plasticbag.org and general all round web dude

 

Jen & I. Oh dear lord – how young we look. I was 18. A wee young scamp!

 

There was a lovely photographic project from Heather Champ called The Mirror Project – featuring submitted photos of people taking pictures of themselves in mirrors of various shapes and sizes – its tag line was ‘Adventures in reflective surfaces’, so it became quite a fun challenge to take your picture in as weird and wonderful a mirrored object as possible.

Following in the US bloggers mirror photo in Bruce Sterling’s loo earlier that year at SXSW, we trooped off to the loo to take our own UK bloggers loo mirror photo. Et voila.

 

The UK blogging community grew and we made more wonderful friends. And continued to meet up in various pubs and the like. We had a 5th anniversary blogmeet to commemorate that first encounter:

Tom

Tom, before he moved to San Francisco

 

Dan & Katy

Dan, before he left for Portland (with a slightly older, although not much wiser, me)

 

Sinister A-List Cabal (minus Lloyd Wood)

Group shot! As well as great friendships, deeper bonds had formed. Meg and Paul got together – I think by this point they were married. They’re now expecting their first child. There are loads of other blogger couples and babies too. Tom grumbles he’s the only one who hasn’t got laid because of his blog. I say he’s not trying hard enough…

 

Meg, Katy & Jen

Obviously we had to follow it up with a follow up mirror shot – note the quality of the photography has declined as we moved on from ‘proper’ cameras to these brand new inventions called camera phones. Proper sophisticated we were.

I left the final word with Meg, who as ever says it more eloquently than I could

And you know the best thing?

I’m still in touch with all the people above, and I count many of them among my closest friends. Plus most are still blogging in some shape or form. The itch never goes away.

We still meet up occasionally for drinks in various bits of the world, even after all this time. That’s the effect of blogging community. Long may it last!

My story about the internet is partly about the early days of this emerging phenomenon that would turn out to change the media landscape more than we could ever have predicted – but mainly, it’s about people. As it always is. It’s the ‘social’ in social media. My story is about the wonderful people that blogging has brought into my life (including my beloved partner Simon, who 8 and a half years later I share a home and a life with).

And for all these wonderful joys, I say, thank you internet.

November 16, 2011 in Communication | Permalink | Leave a Comment

Content strategy isn’t a nice to have (or why I don’t want your brand to be my friend)

The planning and discussing and repeated rounds of debate and review and re-working to the nth degree of copy for the typical ad campaign often seems never-ending. Ensuring that work meets brand guidelines, is in keeping with the brand values, brand pyramid, brand molecule or what have you, yada yada yada.

As with any decent media strategy. The role for channels should be carefully thought-through, with a clear definition of the comms task and the role that each channel should play, and so on.

But when it comes to brand content in social channels like Twitter and Facebook, or even sometimes on their blogs and brand sites, carefully considered comms and content strategy appears to be falling by the wayside for more and more brands. Consideration for tone of voice – which would be so rigorously scrutinised in an advert – appears to be totally ignored.

It’s lazy. It shows a lack of thought, and a lack of understanding of the people they’re seeking to engage and consideration for the user.

Take Rightmove. Their service is about helping people buy, sell, rent or let their home. It’s one of the biggest life decisions you’ll make. Property’s serious business. The market’s changing, it’s tough whichever side of the fence you’re on. If you’re in the property market, what you really need is reliable info, help & guidance. You want a trusted partner to help you make the right decision.

From a content strategy point of view, how could a brand like Rightmove add value? What do customers and prospects most need and want? Expert advice, market insight, the latest news & updates before anyone else, perhaps? Maybe with an authoritative but friendly tone of voice?

Or maybe the brand could just throw random stuff at Twitter to show how TOTALLY AWESOME they are!!!!

Like pointing out (admittedly very cute, but unsure what it has to do with Rightmove) a video of Elmo from Sesame St cooking paella with Philip Schofield & Holly Willoughby on This Morning:

Or chatting about what people got up to over the bank holiday weekend:

Or moaning about how rubbish the weather is:

It’s partly the Innocentification of cutesy, zany copy where it’s just not plausible or appropriate for the brand (for more on the Innocentification of copy and brand authenticity, see the most excellent Shift Run Stop episode with the lovely & talented Denise Wilton – lovely friend, co-founder of B3ta, currently creative director at BERG, and formerly creative director at Moo).

But it’s also suggestive of a complete lack of content strategy – of thinking how the brand can really add value, what kind of content will be most appropriate, within which channels, and what tone of voice will communicate this most effectively. Of not really understanding what kind of relationship the people they’re trying to engage want to have with their brand. Whether they want a brand to be useful, helpful and deliver against their brand promise – or whether they want a brand to be their mate.

We strategists & planners are partly to blame. We’ve tried to encourage our clients to communicate more humanly and less like faceless corporations. But without a clear and well-defined content strategy, it appears we’ve opened Pandora’s box.

Content should engender trust.

Brands should use their content – digital or otherwise – to communicate the values and associations they want to convey.

They should use their content to deliver on their brand promise. To be useful. Helpful. Yes, be friendly, but be appropriate:

Content strategy isn’t a nice to have, brands. What you do, what you say, and how you say it, what relationship you want to have with the people you’re trying to engage, matters. Really it does. Give it some proper care and attention, why don’t you?

Addendum: Bobbie Johnson has written a fab article on GigaOm which articulates his frustration with what he terms the hypercasual far more eloquently – def worth checking out: Hypercasual : when the web gets a little too friendly

 

(HT @simonth for pointing out Rightmove to me)

September 5, 2011 in Brands, Communication | Permalink | 4 Comments

Drawing lives through magic

Well, according to Keith Haring, who was a bit good at drawing:

Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.

I wrote a post a couple of years back singing the praises of good old fashioned pen and paper. And it seems the more advanced our technology the more we still continue to crave the lo-fi. We’re drowning under an onslaught of words, pixels and bytes, torrents of bits of digital information cascading through our lifestream every day. And so it seems we seek solace in the comfort of the old-fashioned, always reliable, analogue drawing lovingly crafted with paper and pen.

One of my favourite sessions at last year’s SXSWi was Visual Notetaking where such luminaries as Sunni Brown, Mike Rohde, Dave Gray and Austin Kleon shared their tips on the whys and hows of sketchnotes to capture and visualise information:

Visual Note-Taking 101 from SXSW 2010

I’m seething with envy and bursting with admiration for those talented individuals who can put this into practice. You’ve got professional outfits like Scriberia, who did a phenomenal job capturing everything at Good for Nothing:

 

And it’s an utter delight to see beautiful sketchnotes appear which capture events you’ve been to, like Eva Lottchen’s notes from The Story 2011:

The Ministry of Stories & Matt Adams @ The Story 2011

 

The charm of hand-drawings is everywhere. Of course it never went away, but the more we embrace screens and gestural interfaces the more stark the contrast with good old pen and paper.

Also from The Story were some of my favouritest slides EVER, from Mary Hamilton on Zombie LARPs. If there’s ever a way to un-PowerPoint PowerPoint it’s hand drawn cartoons of zombies, surely?

Zombie LARP – a story machine

 

xkcd is one of the most successful webcomics around mainly because it’s fucking funny. But there’s no denying the stick figure drawings add no small degree of charm to the whole shebang.

Music videos too. I’m biased because it’s a video from one of my absolute most-loved musicians, and one of my favourite tracks from 2010, but I find the video for From Above (a collaboration, like the rest of the brilliant album Lonely Avenue, with Nick Hornby, who wrote the lyrics)

 

It might be bordering on twee, in fact, a lot of this might be unequivocally slap bang in the midst of twee, but I find it utterly charming and a really refreshing antidote to the rest of my highly rendered and pixellated life. They feel genuine, personal and real. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but more often than not I’d take a scribbled, lovingly crafted hand-drawing over a relentlessly over-optimised Photoshopped picture…

February 24, 2011 in Communication | Permalink | 2 Comments

Blogging like it’s 2000

Ben Terrett’s launched a campaign to get make blogging good again, under the call to arms to start blogging like it’s 2004. Several people agreed, and have vowed to come on board.

2004 wasn’t a vintage year for my blog, as I was doing my finals at university, moved to London and started my first graduate job, and found that my time was spent more on real life rather than updating my blog.

So for me, I thought maybe I could take it a bit further back, and think about blogging like it was 2000, when I first started blogging, over 10 years ago – I’m not sure if the 2000-era style of weblogging quite fits Ben’s idea ‘proper blogging’, but it was definitely my most prolific year, and thinking about this brought on a wave of nostalgia, thinking about how much the world of blogging has changed since then.

I started blogging in May 2000, mainly because my good friend Tom Coates said he was fed up with me emailing him links to post on his weblog, and why didn’t I just start my own? I’d published my first website on (the now defunct) Geocities back in 1997, but I bought my first domain in honour of my foray into this weblogging thing.

Hosted WYSIWIG services like Blogspot, Typepad, WordPress.com or Tumblr didn’t exist. Neither did Moveable Type or WordPress.org. Pitas had launched in ’99 and was used by a few, Groksoup came along (and went) whilst Dave Winer launched Edit This Page. But most of us used Blogger – the old Blogger, the version that was discontinued in May 2010 – hosting our blogs on our own servers, and publishing via FTP.

We didn’t have permalinks or comments. So the way you commented on a blog post was either to email them, or to write a response on your own blog (the trackback wasn’t yet a Blogger feature, so you had to have tracking embedded in your code so you could check your server logs to see who was linking to you, to see such responses. Or of course, you’d see it anyway, because we all read each others’ blogs).

It really was a small, and pretty tight-knit community. A new UK blog being created was big news, and as RSS readers weren’t yet commonplace (if they’d even been invented?), we kept tabs on who’d joined our blogging fraternity when they were updated through the Updated UK weblogs list. And in fact if you wanted, you could find a list of pretty much every weblog published by going to the Eatonweb portal, published by Brigitte Eaton: in ’99 she compiled a list of every weblog she knew about and created the Eatonweb Portal. It’s still going and now it’s a massive directory, but back then it was a personal and hand-curated list of pretty much all the weblogs out there on t’interwebs, all listed in one place. It was awesome.

Technorati didn’t exist yet, but we fed our obsession with rankings by feverishly checking our position on the Beebo Metalog, which listed the most popular weblogs (back when these were blogs lovingly created by inviduals, not huge media enterprises like the Gizmodos and HuffPos of the world).

To avoid slipping down the Metalog, if you went on holiday, you’d get someone in to guestblog for you, giving them blogger access to post while you were away. Coates and I had a lot of fun guestblogging at Riothero.com – not just blogging, but redesigning the whole site, and as I recall, plastering the naked torso of a hot young stud as the background.

This resdesign and general mischief-making then became a front page post at Metafilter. We had a blast tinkering around and having fun with this new form of publishing, and took it as high praise indeed when we were described like a stream of bat’s piss:

Now, I came around when Tom and Katy were Accidentally Rio Theros, because Goddamn those two are witty, smutty and vile. I love them. Like a stream of bat’s piss, they shine out like a shaft of gold when all around is dark

I’m so tempted to put that on a business card or as a LinkedIn reference.

But more than accolades about streams of bat’s piss, I’ve made some fantastic friends through blogging. I met Dan Hon, Meg Pickard and Jen Bolton at the first ever UK blogmeet in June 2000. And lovely folks like Matt Webb, Tom Armitage, Bobbie Johnson, Simon Pearson, Phil Gyford and Mo Morgan, were befriended at subsequent blogmeets, amongst many others. International friends too. When I went to San Francisco in 2001, I had dinner with Heather Champ and Derek Powazek, and chatted with other bloggers like Ev Williams (yes, that Ev, he of Twitter fame) at Derek’s Fray Day. When Caroline van Oosten de Boer came over to the UK, drinks were organised. When Jason Kottke was in London, we had a transatlantic geekout mooching round Borough market and eating cake at Maison Bertaux. Not all of these people are still blogging (though most are, albeit most of us on different domains), but they’re still friends.

And amongst these friends, there were blog marriages too. Meg Pickard and Paul Tweedy, Heather Champ and Derek Powazek, Sasha Frieze and Darren Shrubsole, Meg Hourihan and Jason Kottke, all met through blogging and subsequently got hitched. Though there are tonnes of stats about how many people have met their partner online nowadays (not least due to the advent of online dating) this was pretty unusual back then – Meg and Jason’s romance through blogging was even featured in the New Yorker – first in 2000, then in a follow-up piece in 2006.

But at the time, the whole thing was still very much outside the mainstream. I was interviewed for an Evening Standard article in Aug 2000 about this strange new phenomenon called weblogging (complete with screen capture of my eye-bleedingly awful site design at the time & snapshot from my webcam feed, because a cam feed was de rigeur at the time (see below), and then again 2 months later for an article in the Guardian. The world was small, so my little UK blog made it into an article about this new blogging thing in the US mag CMJ Music Monthly.

 


[ click on image if you have some strange urge to read the full article ]

 

Our writing tended towards shorter, more frequent updates with a mixture of personal diary entries and random links we’d spotted – and because there were many fewer places to discover links, there was a good chance you could actually be the first to blog a particularly interesting link, and could derive a smug sense of pleasure for successfully claiming first-to-blog.

Rebecca Blood wrote an essay in Sept 2000 entitled ‘Weblogs: A History and Perspective‘, which so eloquently describes what ‘old fashioned blogging’ means to me:

The original weblogs were link-driven sites. Each was a mixture in unique proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays. Weblogs could only be created by people who already knew how to make a website. A weblog editor had either taught herself to code HTML for fun, or, after working all day creating commercial websites, spent several off-work hours every day surfing the web and posting to her site. These were web enthusiasts.

Many current weblogs follow this original style. Their editors present links both to little-known corners of the web and to current news articles they feel are worthy of note. Such links are nearly always accompanied by the editor’s commentary. An editor with some expertise in a field might demonstrate the accuracy or inaccuracy of a highlighted article or certain facts therein; provide additional facts he feels are pertinent to the issue at hand; or simply add an opinion or differing viewpoint from the one in the piece he has linked. Typically this commentary is characterized by an irreverent, sometimes sarcastic tone. More skillful editors manage to convey all of these things in the sentence or two with which they introduce the link (making them, as Halcyon pointed out to me, pioneers in the art and craft of microcontent). Indeed, the format of the typical weblog, providing only a very short space in which to write an entry, encourages pithiness on the part of the writer; longer commentary is often given its own space as a separate essay.

Whilst the world may be a very different place, in some ways, our blogging style of shorter, more frequent & often link-based entries isn’t hugely dissimilar to the way we use Twitter or Tumblr – it’s just that we spread our microcontent over different platforms – so perhaps we’ve come full circle…

September 22, 2010 in Communication | Permalink | 22 Comments
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