Meg Hourihan's talk Reboot 2003, Copenhagen, Denmark 20JUN03 Impressionistic notes by Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com -- I cofounded Blogger with Ev Williams, but left to focus on writing, speaking and evangelizing blogs. Now that blogs have taken off, I'm able to actually talk about blogs, as opposed to using Javascript to build apps. I like speaking because it's almost always men speaking at these events. I told Nikolaj off about the all-men speaker-lineups at Reboot, and he invited me to talk here. I'm working on Lafayette project now -- more about that later. But if you have a better name for it -- Lafayette is a working title -- tell me. Maybe a cool Danish name? What's a blog? * A page * Chronologically ordered * Small chunks of hypertext * Date stamps * Permalinks * Some have titles This is new and unique, as compared to previous publishing, online and offline. Timestamps give a sense of timeliness and convey the frequency of change and the currency of information. Permalinks: made it possible to talk about individual posts. An important distinction from the earlier days. Enables distributed discussion. The first Web-native format. There's no reason to have "pages" in hypertext. The appropriate unit is a "post." But the distinction doesn't matter anymore. This is what the web was supposed to be in the first place: writable. It took a while, but we've got it now. We don't use text anymore -- photoblogs, etc. An easy way to publish and share. -- What are we doing with blogs? There're two sides: writing blogs and reading blogs. Pyra/Blogger made it easy to write blogs. We've made a lot of progress. Blogger's been around for 4 years. More people can write to the Web with more tools. There's TypePad, etc. The blog is becoming an online identity -- who I am, what I do, what my pix are of, who are my friends. Today, you can review a book on your blog and a review on Amazon. It would be better if you could just tell Amazon about the review on your site. More distributed. It would be cool to link recipes/reviews to Epicurious and collaboratively filter that info (people who cooked this, also cooked this). You get to own your content but connect with others, retain copyright but still participate in your discussion. There are still no good tools for reading blogs. When the press reports on blogs, they'll list two or three, but what if they don't resonate with you? How can the general population find blogs in a timely, relevant manner? We can connect people using blogs in a social way. RSS makes it easy to read blogs. Can RSS scale to 10,000,000 readers polling 3,000,000 blogs for updates? It's pretty antisocial: every person tries to get new posts on her own, a 1-to-1 manner. It's very technical. You need to download a reader, find feed URLs -- too complicated for many people. Trackback makes explicit connections between sites -- enables explicit conversations. It's also labor intensive [Ed: Danny O'Brien calls them "Referer logs you write by hand"]. If it gets easier to do this, more people will. -- The Lafayette Project: Make it easier to read weblogs. When you find a blog you like, you also like the blogger. You have shared interests. You don't ask your friends for restaurant reviews, but your friends will tell you about the restaurants you enjoy. Lafayette builds on the social network that underlies blogs. If you like reading kottke.org, you might like megnut.com, and if you like megnut.com, you might like boingboing.net. I co-founded this with Nick Denton, and we hired our engineer in April. Hoping to have a beta in July. We're building an RSS reader that will tell you about the sites that have updated recently. Then we're building the recommendation engine. We're going to add more predictions -- we'd be able to tell you about Reboot, posts about Reboot, even if there's no direct matching. Over 50% of blogs are non-English. Polish blogs may link to English blogs, but the English blogs don't link back. We want to make a tool available to anglo bloggers to help them read non-English blogs. Will there be a blog-backlash? Will people stop blogging? I don't think so. It's more exciting than ever. We're on the cusp of even more interesting, greater content being blogged. 9/11 created a new generation of bloggers ("warbloggers"). These guys are huge -- 200k pageviews/day at Instapundit. More people are coming online and creating blogs. The tools are improving. As the readers improve, we'll see a whole new way to read and access the content.