Why so quiet?

I hadn't meant for things to go so quiet here, and it's not just a matter of being busy.  I've also been finding it harder to write about "the web", not because I don't want to, but because I'm just not running across as many webby things to write about.

That got me thinking, just what is the web these days?  And that in turn got me thinking that the web is, in a way, receding from view, even as it becomes more and more a part of daily life, or, in fact, because it's more and more a part of daily life.

There is still plenty of ongoing work on the technical side.  HTML5 is now a thing, and Adobe Flash is officially "end of life" (though there's a bit of a mixed message in that Adobe's site for it still says "Adobe Flash Player is the standard for delivering high-impact, rich Web content." right below the banner that says "Flash Player’s end of life is December 31st, 2020").  Microsoft has replaced Internet Explorer with Edge, built on the Chromium engine.  Google is working to replace cookies.  I realize those are all fairly Google-centric examples, and I don't want to imply that no one else is doing important work.  Those were just the first examples that came to mind, for some strange reason.

On the one hand, those are all big developments.  Adobe Flash was everywhere.  It's hard to say how many web pages used it, but at the peak, there would be on the order of billions of downloads when Adobe pushed a release, because it was in every browser.  Internet Explorer was the most-used browser for over a decade, and the standard browser on Windows, which would put its user base in the billions as well (even if some of us only used it to download Chrome).  Somewhere around 20% of web sites, however many that is, use cookies.

On the other hand, they are all nearly invisible.  I can remember a few times, early in the process a couple of years ago, when Chrome wouldn't load some particular website because Flash was disabled, but not enough to cause any real disruption.  I'm sure that the shift from Explorer to Edge was disruptive to some, but when I set up a laptop for a relative a little while ago, they were much more concerned with being able to check email, write docs or play particular games than which browser was making that happen.  As for cookies, I haven't looked into exactly how they're being replaced, because I don't have to and I haven't made time to look it up.

Because the web is everywhere, the huge number of websites and people browsing means that it's most important to keep everything running smoothly.  Unless you're introducing some really amazing new feature, it's usually bad news if anyone knows that you made some change behind the scenes (whatever you think of Facebook as a company, please spare a thought for the people who had to deal with that outage -- even with a highly-skilled, dedicated team keeping the wheels turning, these things can happen, and it can be devastating to those involved when it does).

The upshot here is that I don't really have much interesting to say about much of the technical infrastructure behind everyday web experience.  Besides not having been close to the standards process for several years,  I figured out very early that I didn't want to write about the standards and protocols themselves -- there are plenty of people who can do that better than I can -- but how they appear in the wild.  Thus the field notes conceit.

It was interesting to write about, say, Paul Vixie's concerns about DNS security or what copyrights mean in the digital age, but topics like that seem less interesting today.   Regardless of the particular threats, the real benchmark of computer security is whether people are willing to put their money on the web -- buy, sell, send money to friends, check their bank statements or retirement accounts, and so forth.  That's been the case for a while now, through a combination of security technology and legal protections.  Importantly, the technology doesn't have to be perfect, and a good thing, that.

The question of how creators get paid on the web is still shaking out, but one the one hand, I think this is one of those problems that is always shaking out without ever getting definitively resolved, and on the other hand, I'm not sure I have anything significant to add to the discussion.

As much as I don't want to write a purely technical blog, I also don't want to lose sight of the technical end entirely.  I'm a geek by training and by nature.  The technical side is interesting to me, and it's also where I'm most likely to know something that isn't known to a general audience.

Obviously, a lot of the important discussion about the web currently is about social media, but I don't want to jump too deeply into that pool.  Not only is it inhabited by a variety of strange and not-always-friendly creatures, but if I were commenting on it extensively, I'd be commenting on sociology, psychology and similar fields.  I muse about those on the other blog, but intermittently conjecturing about what consciousness is or how language works is an entirely different thing from analyzing social media.

Even so, Twitter is one of the top tags here, ironic since I don't have a Twitter account (or at least not one that I use).

My main point on social media was that some of the more utopian ideas about the wisdom of crowds and the self-correcting nature of the web don't tend to hold up in practice.  I made that point in the context of Twitter a while ago, in this post in particular.  I wasn't the first and I won't be the last.  I think it's pretty widely understood today that the web is not the idyllic place some said it would be a few decades ago (not that that kept me from commenting on that very topic in the most recent post before this one).

On the other hand, it might be interesting to look into why the web can be self-correcting, if still not idyllic, under the right circumstances.  Wikipedia comes to mind ...

Finally, I've really been trying to keep the annoyances tag down to a dull roar.  That might seem a bit implausible, since it's generally the top tag on the list (48 posts and counting), but in my defense it's fairly easy to tell if something's annoying or not, as opposed to whether its related to, say, copyrights, publishing, both or neither, so it doesn't take a lot of deliberation to decide to apply that label.  Also, with the web a part of everyday life, there's always something to be annoyed about.

So if you take out "technical stuff that no one notices unless it breaks", "social media critiques", "annoying stuff, unless maybe it's particularly annoying, funny or interesting", along with recusing myself from "hmm ... what's Google up to these days?", what's left?

Certainly something.  I haven't stopped posting entirely and I don't plan to.  On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be as much low-hanging fruit as there used to be, at least not in the particular orchard I'm wandering through.  Some of this, I think, is because the web has changed, as I said up top.  Some of it is because my focus has changed.  I've been finding the topics on the other blog more interesting, not that I've been exactly prolific there either.  Some of it is probably the old adage that if you write every day, there's always something to say, while if you write infrequently, it's hard to get started.

A little while ago, I went through the whole blog from the beginning and made several notes to myself to follow up, so I may come back to that.  In any case new topics will certainly come up (one just did, after all, about why Wikipedia seems to do much better at self-correcting).  I think it's a safe bet, though, that it will continue to be a while between posts.  Writing this has helped me to understand why, at least.

More rumblings in the world of academic publishing

I've written before about the use of online outlets for quick publication of informal (that is, non-peer-reviewed) results, and arXiv in particular.  In The Case for Books, Robert Darnton expresses concern about the state of academic publishing and the power that the major publishers hold over academic researchers and libraries and wonders what will come of it all.

Now it seems things are heating up.  There is a boycott in progress against Elsevier, the academic publishing juggernaut that owns such publications as Lancet.  A number, and evidently a growing number, of academics are simply refusing to publish in or otherwise participate in Elsevier publications, on the grounds that Elsevier's high prices and profit margins and their overall practices are harmful to those who must publish in them, the institutions who must buy the publications, and to the free exchange of ideas itself.

At this writing, 12,558 people have signed up, giving their full names and affiliations in a searchable list.  These are not random people taking potshots from behind pseudonyms.  These people are putting their reputations on the line publicly and, by walking away from one of the major sources of recognition and exposure, potentially hindering their academic careers.  Their names may be found on thecostofknowledge.com.


The basic issue here is that to have a career in academia, one must produce a steady stream of work.  The universal standard for measuring that stream of work is the number and quality of papers one publishes.  "Publish or perish."

Since anyone at all can print up a paper on a topic of research (and many do), there has to be some mechanism to determine whether a result has any real merit.  In the academic world, that mechanism is peer review.  If you submit a paper to a refereed journal, the editors will select a set of reviewers in your field to go over it.  The reviewers will either reject the article outright or accept it, likely with revisions.

Different journals have different standards for inclusion.  This allows readers to have some idea up front how worthwhile an article is, and provides some means of rating a researcher's output beyond the sheer number of articles published.  In principle, and for the most part in practice, the peer review process ensures that articles in journals are accurate and relevant, at least as far as the reviewers can tell at the time.  Essentially, journals provide brand names.

Peer review is clearly a valuable service, beyond printing and distribution of paper volumes, which is, of course, on the wane.  But there are problems.  In the call to action which started the current boycott,  Timothy Gowers puts forth several complaints:

• Journals cost too much, particularly since the authors and reviewers are paid by their institutions, not the publisher, and it's largely the same institutions that pay for subscriptions to the journals they're paying to produce.
• Online access is behind expensive paywalls.
• Publishers drive the overall cost up by bundling, that is, requiring institutions to buy large numbers of journals, many of which literally go unread, in order to subscribe to the ones they really care about.  An institutional bundle from a given publisher can run into the millions of dollars per year.
• While many publishers produce expensive journals and require bundling, Gowers calls out Elsevier in particular for several reasons, including supporting legislation that restricts access to published results and playing hardball with institutions that try to resist bundling.

In short, publishers are in serious danger of losing their relevance, and in the view of those joining the boycott, Elsevier is one of the worst offenders.

It's all well and good to object to publishers' behavior and organize a boycott, but the academic world also seems actively engaged in building a more open, web-enabled alternative.  This includes

• Blogging as a means of informal sharing and discussion.  Indeed, Gowers' call to action appeared on his blog (which, with a mathematician's precision, he calls "Gowers's Weblog")
• Sites, notably arXiv, for collecting unrefereed preprints.
• New online refereed journals aiming to take the place of old ones.  Normally establishing a brand can be difficult, but if the editorial board of the new journal is made up of disaffected board members from old journals, their reputations come with them.

While writing this, I was wondering what would be a really webby way to do this.  Here's a sketch:

• Articles would be published in something more like a wiki form, with a full revision history and editors making changes directly.
• Since reputation is particularly important here, changes would ideally be digitally signed.
• Individuals could put their imprimatur on (a particular revision of) an article they thought worthy.
• The quality of papers could be judged by the reputation of those approving of them, which in turn would be judged by the quality of the papers they'd produced ...

And then it occurred to me that in practice there would probably come to be groups of people whose approval was particularly significant within particular fields.  It would be good to be able to establish groups of, say experts in homology or complex analysis.  It would also be good to have people who were good at steering new works to the appropriate groups of experts.

Hmm ... except for the revision history and digital signatures bit, this sounds an awful lot like a peer-reviewed online journal.

Now I've seen everything

Sorry, horrible title.  I couldn't resist.

"Blind photographer" isn't a phrase that would spring to most people's minds readily, but not only are there such, there is -- of course -- a blog dedicated to blind photography.  From what I can tell, the photographers featured here aren't totally blind, but they are legally blind.  For example, I originally stumbled on this blog after reading about Craig Royal, who writes "My peripheral vision is blurred and the central vision is obscured by a white blindspot." and who processes his pictures with the aid of Photoshop and a telescope.

In other words, the blindness in question, while not complete, is very real and has a real effect on the images produced.  Indeed, the photographs on the site have a character all their own and, in my personal estimation, are just plain good art.

Kids, don't try this at home. Really. Don't.

Whenever I grab a spare moment from not being a lawyer and not being a security expert, I try to find time to not be a research chemist.  Fortunately for all of us, not only have more capable souls taken up that profession, but some of them have seen fit to blog about it.

Along with some interesting commentary on the pharma business and such, Derek Lowe's In the Pipeline includes two fine collections of hair-raising tales, under the headings of Things I Won't Work With and -- less extensively and not quite so entertainingly -- Things I'm Glad I Don't Do.  Some of it's a bit technical, but Lowe does a good job explaining things in a way someone with only basic knowledge of chemistry can understand.

And who am I to complain anyway?  I try to write in such a way that a non-compugeek reader can substitute "peanut butter" for terms like "sliding window protocol" and still get the gist, but I can't promise success in that regard.  At the very least, the non-chemist can substitute "exploding, highly-toxic and malodorous peanut butter" for most of the chemical terms and get the general drift.

Which, one must admit, does give the chemist a bit of a leg up.  I doubt I'll ever get to grace a post here with turns of phrase like

• ... the resulting compounds range from the merely explosive ... to the very explosive indeed
• Fragrance expert Luca Turin has described isonitriles as "the Godzilla of scent", and that's accurate, if you also try to imagine Godzilla's gym socks.
• ... water ice (explosion, natch), chlorine ("violent explosion", so he added it more slowly the second time), red phosphorus (not good) ...
• A colleague of mine made some in graduate school, and came down the hall to us looking rather pale.
• It reeks to a degree that makes people suspect evil supernatural forces.
• ... it’ll start roaring reactions with things like bricks and asbestos tile.
• It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem.
• Read the paper and be glad that this wasn’t your PhD project.

On the other hand, none other than Gordon Moore (of Moore's law fame) got his start in the sciences blowing things up back in the days when a child's chemistry set had Real Chemicals in it.  In their own way, wild-eyed-crazy chemistry experiments are just as much a part of the web's DNA as cryptographically secure pseudo-random number generators peanut butter.




(When I was typing the first sentence, I missed the 'e' in "being."  Blogger's spell checker flagged it.  Yep.)

The no-tag tag

I recently ran across a blog with a tag I don't think I'd seen before: "No particular tag"

What's the point?  Well, for one thing it gives you an easy way to bring up all the posts that don't have any other tag, and which otherwise couldn't be reached at all through the tag list.

This distinction between nothing and a label for nothing comes up again and again: The empty set vs. no set at all; a null value vs. an empty string or other collection; Odysseus getting Polyphemus to say that "Noman" was attacking him ...

It's a double-edged sword.  It's certainly useful, probably even necessary, to have a something-that-stands-for-nothing, but it can also cause no end of confusion.  Any number of bugs come down to losing track of the distinction between no value and an empty value.

It's a neat idea, adding a tag for no tag, but I'm not sure how much demand there is for it.  If there were much, I'd expect to see more of it.  But perhaps I should leave the definitive statement to the experts:

Everybody knows that more wars have been won with a shovel than a sword. Give a man a hole and what does he have? Nothing, but give a man a shovel and he can dig a hole to contain the nothing.

Well now I've done it

Field Notes now has a baby sibling. Its name is Intermittent Conjecture and it has something I haven't seen in years: a post list that fits on one page. In fact, as I write this it contains only an introductory post. Considering that I skipped that formality with Field Notes, I suppose that's another first.

As I say there and said here, the plan now is to relax for a while and post whenever the mood strikes. If it's about the web, it will end up here. Otherwise it will end up there. Unless you are singularly obsessed with or repelled by talk of the web, you will probably not see a lot of difference between the two, other than the range of topics.

If there were regularly scheduled programming, this is where we would return to it.

And I would want to do this, why?

As I've mentioned, Google has decided that not only are blog readers a potential market for ads, so are the bloggers themselves. One ad, in particular, offers to print one's blog in book form. I can see the appeal of that in general, and I'm not alone, but the devil is in the details. The details in this case are not particularly attractive.

• They're offering to print up your blog in softcover for $15 for the first 20 pages and $0.35 for each additional page. This is way, way more than Lulu charges to print on demand, so they're essentially charging you a hefty premium for scraping your blog and formatting it lightly before printing it.
• The formatting options are extremely limited. You can show the entries in forward or reverse order, with or without comments. I didn't find out whether they carry along the style of the online version.
• I didn't see any mention of indexing or table of contents.
• As far as I can tell you can't even customize the title. You can, however, add an introduction/dedication of ... wait for it ... up to 350 characters!
  

I wouldn't call this a scam by any means, as they say up front what they do and what it costs, but it's definitely vanity publishing in the broader sense (see here for some background on what I mean by that). It's certainly not a commercially viable proposition [for the blogger, that is].

If I were to produce a print edition of Field Notes, I'd take a somewhat different approach:

• I'd regroup the posts by theme so it becomes painfully obvious how often I've flogged each dead horse. The tags would be of some help here, but only some.
• I'd provide a short lead-in for each section and a longer introduction for the book.
• I'd probably do some light editing to improve the flow from one post to the next.
• I'd give some indication of links between posts and probably selected external links. Sidenotes, maybe.
• I'd clean up some of the formatting for consistency's sake, particularly the pseudo footnotes that appear here and there and maybe the editorial notes I sometimes add after the fact.
• I'd take out any superfluous commas and parentheses I missed the first time around.
  
• I'd provide a table of contents and index. Again the tags would be of some help, but only some, in constructing the index.
• Along the way I'd probably end up doing some gardening in the blog itself, cleaning up tags and tweaking posts.
• I'd title it Field Notes on the Web: Old-media Remix
  

All of this would entail quite a bit of hand-editing, some custom scripting/XML-bashing, considerable puzzling over what belongs in which section and, not least, re-reading the whole blog and the finished result from start to finish multiple times. To make this worth my while I'd need to see some indication that people would buy it, and I'm at least a couple of orders of magnitude away from that level of readership.

So if you're interested in my version, tell a hundred or so of your closest friends to stop by, and tell them to tell their friends, etc.. Go ahead. I'll wait. In the mean time, if you really, really want to get your hands on a printed, bound copy of a bunch of Field Notes, feel free to track down the service yourself. As far as I can tell, they don't really care whose blog you print, so long as you print it. Myself, I don't see the point.

Next blog, please

I'm not sure why this is happening just now, but a portion of the visitors of this blog are visiting a link called /?expref=next-blog. My guess is that, rather than searching for this particular next blog link, these folks got here by starting someplace else and clicking on next blog until they saw something they liked or got bored and went off to do something else. Blog surfing, basically. So I thought I'd do the same and see what else was out there. [The Next Blog button disappeared a while ago, at least from this blog's style sheets --D.H. Dec 2015]

I didn't keep a close count, but the breakdown was roughly:

• A few family blogs, as in "here's what my family is up to", including one in Swedish. Sort of a year-round online version of the annual holiday letter to one's far-flung friends and relations.
• A few photo blogs, one linked to flickr and offering to sell prints and send e-cards using the images.
• A craft blog or two, one in Norwegian and English.
• Several poetry blogs
• Nothing technical, whether figuring out the web or anything else.

I have no idea if this is a representative sample, or if not, just how it is selected, or in any case, why the tilt towards Scandinavia. The lack of technical content has an easy and -- to my mind -- encouraging explanation: The web really is accessible to a broad range of people, only a few of whom are interested in its technical workings.

From a purely formal point of view, almost all the blogs hew pretty closely to the prototypical one or several contributors posting sporadically about whatever. That makes perfect sense given that the blog is a form, not a genre, but I was still a bit taken by just how much blogs look and smell like blogs.

One formal experiment that I ran across was Quoted Images, Imaged Quotes, in which a photographer and partner are collaborating to produce a captioned image every day for a year. Rather than writing a caption, the captioner chooses a quote to fit the image (or perhaps vice versa, or both). Even this experiment is not without precedent. Thing a week comes to mind.

Blogging is not a genre

I think this is probably one of those that seems less profound when you start to write it down, but here goes:

A news report this morning introduced one of its subjects as "a blogger" from a country currently in political turmoil. Automatically an image formed of a member of the opposition bravely reporting conditions and advocating for the cause, at considerable personal risk. Salam Pax would be an archetype here.

As it happened, that particular image was basically correct. But as with all snap judgments, it need not have been. Run down the following list of labels and see if a particular image doesn't form involuntarily:

• Political blogger
• Entertainment blogger
• Mommy blogger
• Blogger

If you're like me (and if your mileage varies, great!), all but the last invoke not just the literal meaning but a particular kind of blogger. "Political blogger" suggests a partisan of whatever party. "Entertainment blogger" suggests tabloid-style gossip. "Mommy blogger" suggests a "soccer mom." I would venture to guess that for many people "blogger" in general suggests a particular genre of interest. For example, a politician might equate "political blogger" with "those irresponsible muckrakers making my life miserable" or "those hard-working souls selflessly putting the word out," depending on the day.

Interestingly, those characterizations don't seem a particularly good fit for the handful of blogs I actually read semi-regularly (These in turn are fairly disjoint from the blogs I've referenced here. This blog is about the web, not so much about my reading habits per se). That's not a complete surprise. When I try to decode someone's shorthand description, I'm trying to figure out what they mean, not what I might mean by the same thing.

But blogging is not a particular genre. Blogging is fundamentally a structure. Its distinguishing feature is not that it is about a particular brand of politics, or gossip, or parenting or whatever. Its distinguishing feature is that it is written serially, in small segments.

There does not need to be a great deal of continuity across those segments. The topic can shift with each post. Characters and scenery may or may not recur. Any action described in one post may or may not relate to action in any other post. On the other hand, because a blog is generally written by a single author or at most a small group, there will generally be some continuity of theme and style.

Within those constraints -- short, serialized segments and general continuity of theme and style -- pretty much anything is possible. Just as there are many genres of novel, play, movie, TV show, magazine article or newspaper column (one of the blog's closest relatives), there can be, and are, any number of genres built on the blog structure.

Nope, that wasn't particularly profound, but I guess I had to get it out of my system anyway. What can I say? I used to be an English major (for all of a semester).

14:59 left on the fame clock

A friend of mine writes an occasional blog on, well, whatever pops into his mind at the moment. He's done absolutely nothing to publicize it. In fact, he prefers anonymity, which is why I haven't provided a link. Occasionally people stumble across it anyway, typically once every day or so. Given the number of potential readers out there, that's a nearly perfect record of obscurity. He's even farther out on the long tail than I am.

A couple of years back, this friend posted an album review of the latest offering from a band with a fairly large cult following. Nothing much came of it, but even so it came to account for a significant portion of the site's traffic. Then, one day not too long ago, the post seemed to catch the attention of the band's fan base. In one day, that one post got hundreds of hits. Still not much compared to a major commercial site, but well more than the entire site had garnered in the previous year.

Of the hundreds of visitors, almost all bounced right back off the site. A few followed the tag for that band. Since there was only one post with that tag, this didn't get far. Few, if any, stayed to browse the other posts. Two left comments. The first completely disagreed with the review. The second completely agreed.

And that was it. The site has since settled back into obscurity. If he'd been concerned that a horde of fans was going to overwhelm the site and flood it with comments, that concern has passed.

The lesson here, I think, is that if the long tail idea has legs (interesting image, that), and a small site can become modestly profitable if only it can find its audience, it needs to focus tightly on its particular niche. A site dedicated to care and feeding of 1948 Oldsmobiles might well find a following of rabid Olds fanciers. A blog on anything and everything, done for the author's amusement, will pass largely unnoticed. My friend assures me this suits him fine.

Why are there blogs in print?

A while ago I asked "Why is there still print?". Asked, but didn't really answer. If books area test case for going digital (again leaving aside that text is fundamentally digital), then a blog, which is already available online for free, has got to be the acid test. Why on earth would one put a blog in print?

In Conversational Reading, a blog in form if not name, Levi Stahl examines the role of self-publishing (that is, print self-publishing) in putting blogs in print and tells why he has bought not one, but two self-published books adapted from blogs. Essentially, there's something about a book.

It's nice to have an index in the print edition, though.

We're only in it for the money

In this week's Techtonic Shifts column in Newsweek, in a piece entitled Time to Hang Up the Pajamas, Daniel Lyons delivers a few home truths about the blogosphere. The gist is: almost no one makes much money blogging, though a very few do quite well. "Monetizing" blogs and social networking in general is proving harder than some may have expected. As Lyons says,

Advertisers shy away from blogs because they're too unpredictable and because few blogs attract anything approaching a mass audience—and even those that do face so much competition that ad rates remain pitifully low.

It's not the economy. It's systemic. It's the promise of narrowcasting fulfilled. It's very easy for me to get my message out to whoever might be interested in random thoughts about the web and the technology floating around it. It's easy for someone interested in, say, Deutsch's fallacies to find my take on it, and thence the list itself.

But from a business point of view, who cares? At some point it's nice that I could get some money out of writing up my random thoughts instead of no money, but I'm orders of magnitude away even from that point, and there are scads and scads of other bloggers out there in the same boat. Conversely, if you have something of interest to a ma$$ audience, blogging is not a great way to cash in. Lyons again:

Some A-list bloggers have found that the best way to "monetize" their work is by returning to the much-maligned "mainstream media"—like political writer Andrew Sullivan, whose blog, The Daily Dish, now runs on The Atlantic Monthly Web site.

Lyons also mentions purely online outlets like the Huffington Post and The Daily Beast but argues, with some reason, that these are basically online media companies that happen to include blogging. In short, if you want to make money writing, you go through a publisher, just like always (or occasionally you hit a home run without a publisher, just like always).

There does seem to be a slow shift from publishing on paper to publishing on line, but -- beating the not-so-disruptive technology drum one more time -- it seems much more likely that the business world is driving the technology world and not the other way around. If the technology really were disruptive, we'd be seeing very little paper publishing and lots of electronic self-publishing. Instead, we see a much slower shift away from paper than the technology will allow and most of the actual money still going through corporate publishers.

(It occurs to me that the shift to paper seems to corrolate with frequency of publishing. Newspapers have been significantly affected by the web, particularly by the advent of online analogs to classified and personal ads. Book publishing is almost unaffected. In the middle, most major magazines have online presence but continue to publish on paper. Or on the other hand, maybe the distinction between news and fiction -- fill in your own punchline on that one -- is more siginficant. But I digress.)

In any case, I'm happy to keep cranking out my ten or so posts a month when time permits, safe in the knowledge that whatever I do, it's unlikely to rock anyone's boat very much. If you're in the blogosphere, odds are you're there for the same reason you're in a band in college: because it's what you want to do, not because you expect to make a living at it.

FZ, RIP.

Happy birthday, Field Notes!

Well now.

A year ago I wrote the first post on this blog, about e-tickets and copy protection. The thesis, which I still buy, is that strong copy protection only exists in the physical world and that in most cases tying virtual content to the physical world is likely to fail. If technology is inherently limited but we still want people who create content to get paid, it'll be up to " a web (if you will) of legal and social constructs". The good news is that that's already how the world works.

It might seem a random place to start, but it does introduce one of the main themes here: the interaction between technology and society. I've since come to think that the web is one of the clearest and most pervasive examples of this interplay. One of the beauties of blogging is seeing such themes develop over time. You can only set out so much at the beginning. The rest you discover, thus the subtitle: "figuring out the web as I go along."

When I first started, I was imagining a wide-ranging discussion of high-level architectural concepts, spiced with real-world examples. But I kept the title deliberately vague (the original candidate, wisely discarded, was "morphisms") to allow some wiggle room. In the event, I think the focus has drifted toward a wide-ranging collection of real-world examples, spiced with the occasional comment on architecture.

I'm happy with that, and it seems more in keeping with the idea of "field notes". As I understand it, real field work in science consists mostly of meticulous observation, with theory providing some hints as to what to look for. I'm coming from the same angle here, minus the "meticulous" part. Sometimes I'll write up something I've been stewing over for a while, but if I see something random and interesting float by in the meantime I'll go ahead and write it up. Why not? It's fun.

I read somewhere that of the millions of blogs out there, most don't survive their first year, so I'm happy to have made it this far. Except for an initial burst of activity tapering off last September, I seem to be managing a dozen or so posts a month, though not at the steady rate of one every two or three days that that might suggest. This seems about right. There's always something to write about when your topic is "the web", but not always time to write.

If you've been reading along so far, thanks, and I hope you've enjoyed it. Thoughtful comments and questions are always welcome, but lurking silently is just fine, too.

Barristers and bloggers

Picking up where I just left off ...

Some professions seem fairly immune to technological change. The law is one. As the man said, lawyers find out still litigious men. If automobiles supplant buggies and consign the buggy whip makers to a small niche, chances are everyone involved will want to consult a lawyer sooner or later.

Which brings up a question: In the spectrum from buggy whip makers through blacksmiths, brewers and bakers to lawyers, where do writers fit in? My fond hope is that it's closer to the lawyer end (at least in terms of viability), and I think there's some evidence for that.

The odds seem good that there will continue to be viable business models in which writers get paid, whether it's through advertising, or as part of the production of interactive games and experiences or perhaps some other way. Certainly people still seem interested in text and in scripted entertainment.

And yet the writing game must surely be changing. Consider blogging. That's something radically new and different, right? Well, it depends. Certainly the medium is new, but just how has it changed the game?

For example, this blog, along with many others, is basically a column. The genre has been around for quite a while. The present example owes as much to E. B. White (at least as a model to strive toward) as it does to the pioneers of the web (to whom it also owes much).

What about political bloggers, with their game-changing, king-making deal-breaking influence? Is this a new phenomenon, or is it just political activists -- players in another very old game -- making use of the latest technology? (Let me add that when I say the game is old, I'm not claiming that all political bloggers are working for a particular party. Grass-roots activism has its own long pedigree.)

What about the celebrity and gossip blogs? Again, I'd argue that's an old genre in a new medium, and similarly for music blogs, personal journals and much if not all of the other material I've run across in the blogosphere.

What about the web of reactions among blogs? Surely this is new, could only have happened on the web. Well, no and yes. No, because deliberative exchanges in writing are most likely as old as writing itself. But yes, because the ability to quickly build up such a discussion, and to easily navigate through it later, is new and has a very web-ish flavor.

So what am I trying to say here?

• Writing as a profession seems to benefit from the web, rather than being marginalized by it.
• The web offers new media for writing, but the genres are probably largely the same.
• Web media offer new possibilities but, IMHO, the similarities to old media are at least as significant as the differences.

On that last point, I might liken the situation to 3-D movies vs. traditional ones. Yes, there is a difference, but the basic experiences are more similar than different.