Dave Winer’s book, revisited

I am still thinking about Dave Winer’s book, even though it’s none of my business. I wonder if there are models that suit a serious blogger’s writing methods and style to be discovered in the field of natural history. Chapters with small sub-chapters in a loose progression and grouped somewhat informally, each one focusing on one or two examples or anecdotes and a concept. In other words, not so different from blog posts but accumulating in a way that adds focus and energy. A little different energy from the blog because it does strive to be a book with a single focus and many related subtopics.

Why natural history? Because that field* works in part by accumulation of observations, I believe, as does blogging.

Some parts of DW’s written work fit natural history very well. Imagine 15 short entries about the life cycle of a tech project, say. A few entries about the early stages, a few about the relationship of the tech innovation to the marketplace and to users, a few about the maturation and old age of a tech innovation, a few about the natural enemies of tech innovation, one or two about the wider ecology that supports this innovation, one or two about what the innovation does to the wider social and economic ecology, etc. I know that DW has written about most of these things already or spoken about them in podcasts. Pull those already existing pieces out, arrange them in a progression, and see what examples and what parts of the life cycle of a tech innovation still need to be added to the story. You have a chapter or more underway.

Or take a post from last week, when DW said this:

On the net, your feed is you.

The links you push through this tool will be rendered in many different contexts. That’s why the way you render it is not important. The point of the tool is to connect your linkflow with all the places you might want your links to flow. That’s the reality in 2011, and any blogging tool must take this into account.

Today there are: feeds, rivers and renderers.

This all but sets out the organization for a progression of sub-sections of a chapter, written not so differently than blog entries, based on observations of the nature of the three creatures: feeds, rivers, and renderers. Maybe some of the sub-sections might address these parts of the wider topic:

Things meant to be read by humans. Things meant to be read by machines. Feeds as a hybrid of the two.

Feeds you own. When somebody else owns your feed. When you own your feed. To what degree you can really own your feed. Political implications of feed ownership. Economic implications of feed ownership. Social implications.

How machines read feeds and render them for human eyes. The important differences between various renderers and where they reside. Who creates and who owns the renderers? Why it matters.

Rivers. How they differ from other websites. What they require. What they offer. Why they matter.

Implicit in so much of DW’s work and in these topics is a question: What is the real creative opportunity of the web? [Though he is a technologist, DW plainly sees this as a blend of technological and social creativity.] Where and how is it misunderstood? Where and how is it threatened? How can it be protected? How can we take part in its best opportunities? There should be a chapter that directly discusses these things, but DW would probably not be able to discuss feeds and rivers and other topics without revealing this wider philosophy along the way, too.

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*”Traditional natural history, deriving from Pliny the Elder and Dioscorides, had flourished in the late Renaissance. It involved the mapping of nature through the classification of plants and animals and the assembling of information about their uses and habits. This traditional natural history continued throughout the 17th century and reached its zenith in the 18th century in the work of the likes of Carl Linnaeus.” (Peter Anstey)

Dave Winer’s book

Dave Winer is thinking about writing a book.

What do people imagine would be in Dave Winer’s first book? It would be interesting to ask around. I will pretend here that DW has asked.

I imagine certain kinds of ideas and two kinds of stories. Stories that DW knows from years of conversation are his best stories because of the way people pay serious attention when he tells them in person and online.  The responses people have given tell DW what are some of his greatest moments of clarity. This is a big clue about what should be in the book.

But more particularly: stories he knows are his best stories because they make clear something about humans and the humanity of their technology, because that is his passion and the area of his insight. That and the work it takes to make it happen and the ways we get off track and destroy our opportunities along the way.

My father, a retired business person who uses the web for hours and hours each day, recently said that he doesn’t know what the web is. [I had just said proposed to him that the web should be guarded and supervised legally as a public utility like gas or electric.] Recent lawmaking in Washington suggests that Congress doesn’t know what the web is. When they are done reading, people who buy DW’s book will know clearly what the web is. I realize that my own concept of the web owes a great deal to having read Scripting News since about 2003 and having listened to every episode of Rebooting the News more than once.  There is an idealism and a hard-won realism in DW’s writing that centers on the nature of the web, the human nature of technology, the creativity of the code and of the words and images that surf on that code. There should probably be one rock-solid chapter that teaches exactly what the web is when it is not chopped up by commercial silos, so that people who care will never again be confused about what this or that company is doing on and to the web. This would be a great public service.

DW’s first book might be made up of alternating nodes of story and idea and story and idea, and the chapters would grow out of the nodes with the strongest connections to each other. DW could maybe start listing the stories on Popplet as a way of linking them to each other and to the ideas that they represent. More likely, DW would use an outline, but Popplet has the advantage of being planar instead of linear. More connections during brainstorming, maybe….

The tools that DW has been creating lately are, you can tell from his blog posts, meant to be working models of his insights about the web and its intersection with human creativity. A more experimental version of DW’s first book might simply tell the story of those tools as a way of opening up the themes I’ve mentioned above. Or another path: a book about 10 web tools by many creators in their human contexts of being both created and used, as a way of sharing the 10 most important insights about the web’s centrality in human creativity now, and its nature, and its vulnerability.

DW’s book might resemble elements of the books he most admires, the ones that help people think and give them permission to innovate and clear the brush away from essential concepts and tools. They crystalize a few things, a few powerful things. They are suggestive and explosive, I bet, rather than definitive.

DW’s book would, implicitly at least, argue against some of the narrow and crippling visions that threaten our public sphere, our web, and our creativity. Or he might take them on more directly. There are stories that might illustrate the options, the roads that diverge and what happens when we choose one or the other.

I wonder what five or ten books DW would be most proud to have written, in the area of web-tech-human creativity? I bet there are clues in those books.

Best wishes and put me down for a copy.

The @McCallSmith mini-essay on Twitter

I think novelist Alexander McCall Smith has invented a mini-essay form suitable for Twitter, and he has been publishing these little essays for some time. He launches a topic over a course of 3-6 tweets, all posted in the space of perhaps a half hour. Presumably he’s been gathering thoughts for awhile in preparation, since the tweets tend to show the topic from a variety of perspectives, as a good personal essay will often do. And a reader is tempted to see the tweets as having been arranged in a thoughtful order, making a progression, leading from an announcement of topic through some examples toward some kind of closure or conclusion. Here is an example, which should be read, in Twitter fashion, from the bottom up:

A question about tweet style

Is this a strong tweet?

@maddow: Brilliant visualization of a hard-to-grasp, important thing: http://is.gd/hX6sQd

Well, as a reader I have no idea what the link offers, and I resist that in a blog posting or a tweet. But if this next tweet’s link is correct…

The promise you make and keep: a brief theory of web publishing. http://is.gd/iiTBa9

…then a writer who makes a strong promise to an audience and delivers on that promise over time may not need to say more than @maddow has said here because readers know what they can expect from a trusted writer:

@maddow: Brilliant visualization of a hard-to-grasp, important thing: http://is.gd/hX6sQd

But a writer who is still shaping an identity or purpose or project will not have established a clear promise that an audience has heard and accepted, and for that audience a tweet like @maddow’s would probably be too skimpy, too much of a tease.

Ethics of tool creation

Of the ethical circumstance of people who create and sell tools in our digital age, Dave Winer says:

I always go with the philosophy that if you produce a tool that is good at reading or listening or watching that you almost have an ethical obligation to make that tool also capable of creating. [DaveCast, 6/22/11, 2:59-3:12]

Alexander McCall Smith on wild and curated spaces

On Twitter, novelist Alexander McCall Smith (@McCallSmith) reports briefly on a conversation about curated spaces with someone from the art world. First this:

Spoke to curator. He made interesting distinction between paintings in gallery (zoo) and those “in the wild” (eg. in churches, houses, etc.). [June 16 2011]

That caught my eye as a useful division for those interested in the role of curation on the web–our shared work of helping others find worthy content by establishing a meaningful context and then linking to it ourselves. Some public spaces in the world, belonging to institutions and dependent on their authority, protect and organize their collections just as zoos and galleries do. On the bright side, good things are preserved and studied and presented, while on the grim side all the fabled limitations of the ivory tower apply: out of touch with the world, shrouded in secrecy, expressed in the language of insiders, etc. Remember, too, how lions used to pace in small enclosures, their feline power driven to the edge of mental illness by their terrible circumstance. Those who study sometimes stifle the thing they seek to know. So “the wild” sounds appealing at the end of that little message. Three minutes later the novelist followed up with this:

Same distinction with men. Some are in the zoo (tamed, quiescent); others in the wild (go to pub, football, think unacceptable thoughts). [June 16 2011]

Here he amplifies the hints of the first message—the gallery or zoo protects but also tames; in the wild there is danger and disorder. It is, perhaps, the tug of civilization at every moment, between that which orders and the energies which it seeks to channel and contain.

I wonder if schools ever talk about adulthood as an opportunity to negotiate between the two very central human impulses. It’s plain that there is a toolkit for acts of curation in various fields, but is there something comparable that helps us benefit from the wild energy? Is there a toolkit, or are the wilds by their very nature beyond the reach of those organizing powers? I wonder if young people would enjoy talking about these two parts of our nature. I don’t recall much along those lines in my upbringing.

How adulthood actually works

David Brooks on the way adulthood works: “Most successful young people don’t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life…. Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.”

Engaging the paper’s site

I would engage much more deeply with our city paper’s website if 1) a long-time subscriber like me didn’t have to pay again to use the archive, which feels unfriendly to one’s best customers, and 2) the writers of the most thoughtful and well-written letters to the editor were given guest blog spots for a month or two, greatly extending the range of voices on the site.

Links for the May 2011 FACET presentation on radio essays

Michiana Chronicles archive with 465 essays in full text and two years of audio.

WVPE Listener Commentary audio archive. [Or, at the WVPE home page: Click on Programs > Audio Archive]

Indiana Public Broadcasting Stations directory with links.

Six radio essays by Eileen Bender: Political Pin — Lame Duck Citizens — Fillibuster — Petition — Children’s Books — Inauguration Tales

Taxonomy of linking

Needed: a taxonomy of the many kinds of links that could then help us explore their differing value for users and their various roles in civic and other collaborative work.

For example, in his article on Matt Drudge’s linking skills, David Carr links to sites with a stake in the practice of linking rather than, say, to writers with ideas about how linking works. He uses the web’s linking power to point to examples, then, rather than to enter explicitly into a sort of a conversation, underway for several years, about his topic.

His article does link and does have a place in the useful history of writing about how linking works. But his own linking practice in this piece (possibly dictated by his employer, the NY Times) suggests, perhaps attracts or even helps to shape, an audience more likely to feel informed about the topic than to engage in its development. If so, then Carr’s links may quietly support the authority of the paper and neglect the collaborative possibilities that are already alive in the topic.

That’s a very quick example, I hope, of taxonomy at work: seeing the types, then considering the value of their differences. This is a small extension of yesterday’s posting on Carr’s piece. Earlier today on Twitter, @Chanders @harrisj and @markcoddington were stirring on this topic of linking.