“metablogging”

In this sense: In the physical world, perhaps one of the biggest, most basic hurdles to overcome for any creature (above plant) is navigating space. Whatever you may want (eat, talk, watch, mate..) you have to be there first. That’s the tyranny of space, a tyranny that lingers despite telecommunications easing it to a degree we can’t really imagine now.

But technology has uncovered a new hurdle, even more basic in some ways, that we hadn’t even glimpsed some decades ago (you don’t much care about space when you live in a pen). The new hurdle is interface—a device’s how, its ways of interaction, what you have to wrestle with to get things done through it. Whatever you may want to do through technology (moving, watching, writing, browsing, talking, killing,...) you have to overcome the interface first. The need is more acutely felt the more plastic and dynamic the technology. The web ranks right up there. The information superhighway delivered its promise of abolishing space but the freedom has shifted the load from our legs to our brains, from space to interface. The challenge is no longer motive, it’s cognitive.

Consider malls. Besides modern comforts and breathtaking opulence, the single main thing they have going for them, their reason for being, is that they get stuff closer. They ease space. That’s also why similar stores cluster together, closeness is so valuable for customers that they force owners to set shop right next to the competition. Big box stores are the climax of contiguity.

A very similar thing happens in the web under interface constraints. Beyond critical-mass, Amazon, eBay, and the myriad vertical marketplaces (etsy is a good one) thrive because there’s a nontrivial number of interface details you have to tiresomely learn, divine, or settle if you go somewhere else. And these details are particularly painful in shopping because the whole process is staggeringly complex: it involves a lot of searching, browsing, foraging, comparing, digesting, authenticating, etc.

But in other areas the reality of the tyranny of interface is just as real. Wikipedia, we’ve now come to realize, is useful chiefly because it provides a single unified interface to knowledge. The blog is one of the most significant web innovations in recent years and at bottom it’s just a genre for the efficient exploitation of interface, uniforming it, streamlining it, adapting content interfaces to the new realities of the web, kind of what convenience stores did for space and cars. Heck, even search engines, interface-saving devices in a way (the search engine is the modern steam engine, directories are human-powered transport), have nontrivial interfaces all their own, as I’ve attested recently trying out torrent engines (mininova, torrentSpy, and isoHunt are my favorites).

You could have once said that downloading was the web’s equivalent of moving but broadband quickly made that friction negligible. In our current web, figuring out interface is the new moving. Interface is the new space.

The problem with abandoning a blog is not the lost posts but the lost sequence. I’ve learned so much these last weeks and yet written so little that what I’ll now post may or may not make sense but will undoubtedly feel broken and out of place. Alas, I have lost the path that took me here and while I’ll try to mention it tangentially it will only be a pale sketch of what it really was. The emotions have cooled and forgotten are most of the shameful and silly detours, dead-ends, and retracings that led me to today. Which is a shame, because they were so much anguished fun.

So I apologize. But this blog is back on track. On steroids and with several weeks of bulging backlog. Après cet post-ci, le deluge.

Scott McCloud begins Understanding Comics^AM wrangling to create a definition of comics, contrasting it with pictures and movies. Taken individually, a picture is merely that, a picture. Arranged sequentially however, pictures are transformed into something else. If the sequence is temporal—pictures alternating in time, fixed in space—we call that art movies. If the sequence is spatial—pictures adjacent in space, “juxtaposed”—we call it comics.

So that’s that. His is a great book and you won’t regret reading it, but for now hearken back with me to the web before blogs. There was, in such olden times, something called the «personal homepage»: primeval websites where people put their disjointed personal trivia for the world to admire. (See An Exploratory Profile of Personal Home Pages: Content, Design, Metaphors.) They were usually boring, disorienting, and self-flattering (think photo albums) but there had been nothing like that before, not on this scale—you could learn about fascinating people you’d otherwise never meet and there were some unbelievable things out there. But back to the photo album metaphor. Personal homepages were piles of scattered, assorted personal paraphernalia—they were, in a way, photo albums.

A photo heap. Intriguing at first but quickly unmanageable and unwieldy.

Then the blogs started to appear. It took a while to notice anything had changed. The diary metaphor obscured as much as it enlightened. With some hindsight it’s easy to pinpoint what happened—and to marvel at how simple yet radical a change it was. The blog era is when websites learned about sequence, spatial sequence. They stopped being fractal trees of buried content and became, yes, comics—post became the new panel.

By spatial, we mean that blogs, just as comics, unfold in space. There’s a post and right below it there’s another, further below, another, and so on. It makes as much sense to talk of a “blog strip” as of a “comic strip”—about the only difference is that the former goes from top-to-bottom while the latter from left-to-right (or right-to-left).

And then there’s sequence. Sequence brought context, interface and development to websites, it gave them personality, motion, and tension, made them subject to change and thus to evolution. Sequence brought time.

Every page in a blog has a natural context: it comes after the previous post and before the next. A blog’s homepage is simply a broad sweep of the most recent panels posts in the strip—an easy way to glimpse the website’s personality and recent happenings. If you’re faithful (or diligent), you can see the writing and the themes evolve through time. The mind fills in the gaps, the bleeds, and the continuity that emerges can feel as real and intense as reality itself. Spatial interface is a brilliant interface in its almost ridiculous simplicity.

(Blogs are the web’s poster boy for spatial sequence but they’re by no means the only (or the first) web form to avail itself of it. Comments, within blogs and beyond, are also spatially sequenced, are also comics. So are forum threads.)

A scene from Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa^WP manga.
Such is the magic of comics. Such is the magic of blogs.

What, then, is the equivalent of movies in the web? What web form is temporally sequenced—”pictures” alternating in time, fixed in space? The hard part, really, was coming up with the question. The answer is obvious: wikis.

Consider a popular pedia^ELZR (Wikipedia article). It’s the product of a myriad interventions (most of them rather trivial) from several Wikipedists, but you are only seeing the most recent frame when visiting the pedia’s URL. If you visit in a couple of hours, chances are someone corrected a typo, reverted vandalism, or added a sentence, and you will thus see a slightly different frame—the pedia has “moved”! Unknown to a surprising amount of users, every pedia has a history where a log is kept of even the most minute change—the movie’s celluloid film. Wikis are movies.

Time-lapse bloom.
Compare with the Time-lapse pedia and its history.

The black background of this website was dropped because I realized recently that some relatively old displays can be configured, by tweaking brightness and contrast, to better display black text on a white background (and it makes sense to do so, most text comes like that) but doing so would turn black elzr.com into garbled chicken scratches.

That was utterly unacceptable.

Two people had complained of such problems before but it was only until I experienced how bad and frustrating it was that I realized it really had to change.

I loved black^EE: it was distinctive, easier on the eyes, allowed for exploration of an entirely different color scheme, and it looked absolutely gorgeous (luscious) on my Dell Ultrasharp.

But I must think of who’s reading my website.

Annzah’s was the first blog I read, back before there was a word for blogs themselves. A belle with a knack for writing, drinking, geeking, musicking, and partying—all with flair—, she used to blog her life at glitterkitty.net/anna: living and growing up in Sweden, her many girlfriends (wives, she called them), her parents (she’s a single child), her extended family, going through one strange boyfriend, moving to London, reading, cooking, clubbing, living with the second (webdesigner!) boyfriend, working at a bar and a clotheshop, getting hurt—falls, car-accidents (hates cars), whatnot—a surprising amount of times, and starting an English major. Her candid blog got her intermittently into trouble and after many false starts she finally changed to LiveJournal, where she blogs very different stuff, far too far and in between.

She was somewhat obsessed with Suede^WP (whom I know thanks to her) and used many of their songtitles for her posts. Today Suede’s Saturday Night^MP3 played randomly and I missed her suddenly, with a vengeance. “Having a public voice can make you a non-stranger, even to people you have never met.” This is a post to her.

Blogs are many different things to all of us, but sometimes, if the stars align just right, they can be empathic enzymes of sorts. They have been.

As you may have noticed, I’m unhealthily and impolitely obsessed with quotes. They easily make for my most popular category and were it not for my negligent restraint every single post of this blog could have its very own quote. Though I doubt anyone actually reads them :(, I love crafting them, specially when I go over the top and quote paragraphs upon paragraphs: I trim that detail, highlight that phrase, color that other, and in general try to make the fragment clear and inviting. Today I’m pleased to announce you that the genre has finally coalesced into what I think I’ll call quote collages. (And in a feat of retcon, there are already 7 quote collages on the blog.)

The first and best example of it was today’s Our Chinese will still beat their Chinese post. A quote collage consists of a big, juicy text extract, color-highlighted and clipped to the point of near-paraphrasing. A Flickr photo is prepended for visual spice.

Do you like them? Do you find the colors useful or annoying? Do you simply skim away and roll your eyes at the sight of (yet) another text monolith?

And while we’re on it, two points (..) inside a quote indicates text was omitted. It’s an elegant OED convention that degrades gracefully (if you don’t know what it means most of the time it’s harmless).

Today, just after finishing a slight redesign of my blog (inspired by caterina’s) and comparing it with other redesigns of other websites I’ve made along the past 2 years, I became aware of a small pattern to my madness: don’t enclose unless you must.

Before

Now

I’m not sure why—tenderfootness I guess—but my first website designs have always been unnecessarily enclosed, too many fences, too many cages. Only after much pruning and shuffling do I realize that much of it is extraneous, just clutter.

Much Much Before

Much Before

Before

Now

Most of the time you don’t need that box around that text, you almost certainly don’t need that big box to enclose your entire website, and you probably don’t need so many borders. Try erasing them and watch your website become more “flowing”, more open.

(For an example of what not to do, check my local newspaper’s hideous, caged redesign.)

Siempre me ha gustado su estilo pero no suelo leer mucho a Germán Dehesa. Ayer que lo hice me sorprendi. La Gaceta del Charro, su columna en Mural, es tan evidentemente un blog! Es cierto que toda columna periodistica es, bien vista, nada mas que un blog atrapado en el papel pero la de Dehesa es cosa aparte. Irrepresiblemente personal y opinionated, plagada de in-jokes y referencias personales, es un filtro de temas muy diversos, como todo buen blog, pero el hilo conductor de todos ellos es siempre visible: Dehesa mismo.

I’ve been pretty uncomfortable these days with this blog.

I understand that and yet I want a change of cage. It may be foolish, but so what? It may not. I want something more à la Gelernter’s information beams. I want my blog to be a stream-of-consciousness. The textstream to the right of this blog has been one of my favorite and most active sections lately but I’m sure most simply miss it. It feels odd there, buried at the side, violating some deep semantic principle, overcrowding the already overcrowded sidebar.

These days, even pigeons have blogs. They provide them with electronic recording equipment and their output is automatically fed into a blog.  —Wait! Pause for a minute to wonder how profoundly weird that is. Done? Go!—  In a way I’m like that, sometimes I’m but a text pigeon, reporting what I find amid the words. And I’m proud of that.