this is sippey.typepad.com

congrats, jason

So Kottke.org turns 10 today.  Huge kudos and congrats!  Jason is truly a pioneering blogger, and despite the explosion of blogs in the last few years, is doing something that is rare and remarkable: delivering a constant stream of high quality content on a wide variety of subjects -- the things that matter to him.

And he's incredibly passionate about that singular / wide-ranging focus.  If you missed it, the other day Jason posted a great piece on one of his more recent obsessions, The Wire.  (I've had to ignore most of what he's been writing about The Wire, since I'm only through season three.) In response, one of his readers commented...

Believe it or not, many of your loyal readers weren't all that interested in "The Wire" and were getting really really really sick of hearing about it.

To which Jason responded...

Please, go away. Seriously. If you're not interested, stop reading. Go outside with a favorite book or something instead. I thought my approach to kottke.org was fairly clear after almost 10 years: I DON'T FUCKING CARE WHAT YOU DO OR DO NOT WANT TO READ ABOUT. I post, you read, that's the deal. There's no "I'd like four graphic design posts, two book reviews, and something about photography with a side of bacon, hold the mayo". If you don't like my filter, there are literally millions of other blogs out there to choose from.

Now, I'm probably embarrassing him a bit by calling out this comment, since Jason is one of the the nicest and most mild-mannered guys I know. But this was one of the better blog comments I've read recently (and I've been reading a lot of them), because it nutshelled exactly what I love about Kottke.org.  Jason blogs about what interests him, in his own voice, with passion and consistency.  And to do what he's done, at the level he's done it, for that long, is commendable.

Congrats, Jason!  Here's to the next ten years.

we're here to compete

(Update 3/12/08:  Wow, I guess all this talk about competition struck a nerve.)

Since when does "competing" equal "playing dirty"? 

Yesterday we ran a post on movabletype.com that touts the advantages of Movable Type over the soon-to-be-released (any day now) Wordpress 2.5. Was the title of the post ("A Wordpress 2.5 Upgrade Guide") cheeky? Sure. Was the post timed for the release of 2.5? Of course! But was the post an accurate representation of the capabilities of Movable Type? Absolutely.

In response (as I'm sure you've seen by now if you read TechCrunch), Matt Mullenwegg twittered "six apart is getting desperate - and dirty." 

I don't call our post desperate or dirty -- I call it competing.

At Six Apart we've been working extraordinarily hard on MT, and we're proud of the product. Over the past year it's been great to see the platform energized and have loads of bloggers moving to MT -- and in some cases even coming back after leaving us for a while. And as Anil pointed out in the post, we know we're not done -- we have an ambitious development schedule for the MT platform, which has evolved from a professional blogging tool to a powerful social networking platform.

So yes -- we're going to compete. And we're going to name check our competition in blog posts when we feel it's warranted. Matt shouldn't have a problem with that -- after all, he has a long history of name checking Six Apart and our products...including characterizing one of our most prominent TypePad bloggers as a "sharecropper." (I'll leave the value judgment re. that particular choice of words as an exercise for the reader.)

Finally, if you're a dyed-in-the-wool Wordpress fan and we have no chance of ever convincing you to switch to a Six Apart product, that's fine. But you should recognize that having a strong, healthy and evolving set of alternatives to those provided by Automattic is only good for blogging. As Anil said in his post, all of us at Six Apart are here because we take seriously our responsibility to invent the future of blogging. We're doing that with our products, we're proud of the work we're doing, and we're here to compete.

big day for movable type

Movable Type is now available under a an open source license.  Huge kudos to the entire team that's worked on this, especially Byrne Reese, Brad Choate, Chris Hall, Anil Dash, Chris Vail and Mark Simmons, who have done all the hard work in getting all the details right. And, of course, many thanks to Ben and Mena for doing their part since day zero "fighting for openness," as Anil puts it so well in the post on movabletype.org.

This is such a great way to bookend a tremendous year for Movable Type; I'm incredibly proud of the work we've done with MT4, and this just puts the icing on the cake. Onward!

nytimes on tmz

Following up on the centrality of Paris Hilton, The New York Times today profiles TMZ.

“There are times, like with the Paris Hilton story, where we’ve set the agenda for what local news and national news are covering,” Ms. Estey McLoughlin said. “Paris Hilton leads every newscast.”

Oh, be sure to click through to page 2 of the story where SHOCKING TRUTHS are revealed -- publicists for the stars "leak" tidbits to TMZ!

kedrosky on hilton

Paul Kedrosky has a great post on the centrality of Paris Hilton, inspired by the fact that more of the demonstrating companies at the Supernova Tech Innovators panel mentioned her than things like, say, AJAX.

I have diddly use for Ms Hilton and the 24x7 coverage of her brief jail visit, but there is a deeper import here. A bunch of blogs that I don't read, like TMZ, are newly winning the traffic wars. What such sites generally have in common is that they don't even have passing acquaintance with technology, geek-ish stuff, and early adopters. Instead, they are oriented toward the sort of inane pablum that fills supermarket glossies, 7pm TV shows, and such. They are, in other words, all about celebrities, gossip, and entertainment.

If you haven't already, go read the whole thing.  And if you're not the "reading type," just scan for the fantastically illustrative chart which tells the whole story.

gomes on candidate blogs

Lee Gomes, in his "Portals" column in the WSJ, covers the "sanitized" blogging that's happening on the presidential sites.  Campaign blogs are nothing new, of course, but I think Gomes touches on what could end up being the meta-theme of politics on the web for '08:  effective cross-channel marketing that leverages the web for what it's good for.

These couple of paragraphs caught my attention...

As candidates deal with the Web, they will start to learn that many Web users have an extremely high opinion of themselves and the online lifestyle they are now leading. Last week, Joe Biden responded via a Webcam to a question posed to him via YouTube. The response was called "a milestone in presidential politics" by one blogger, as though it marked the first time a candidate had ever been asked a question by a citizen.

Then again, Sen. Biden's answer was one minute and 47 seconds long, which is the length of the average long report on a nightly newscast. The question involved the sorts of sacrifices Americans should be called on to make. The answer from the senator mentioned energy conservation and the war in Iraq. Being able to watch a candidate talk about an issue for a whole two minutes unfortunately has been a luxury in the U.S., though the Internet is in the process of changing that.

The soundbite goes to TV, the spin goes to print, the "conversation" goes to talk radio, the in-depth stuff goes to the web...but obviously not on the front page.  Front page blogs will almost by definition be sanitized; that's where the message of the day (and the enthusiastic reaction of the crowd) gets delivered. But the web gives candidates the ability to go deeper with voters, even if our expectations have been degraded to such a point where 1 min 47 seconds is considered "deeper."

So if this is really is all about cross-channel marketing and consumer engagement, then here's a thought experiment: abc.com/lost is to hansofoundation.org as barackobama.com is to <blank>.

omg worst picture evar

But Anil and I had fun doing the "ten years of blogging" interview thing over on the Six Apart News blog.  (He's doing a series of these posts -- check out the ones already up on Dave Winer and Leslie Harpold. I'm in good company.)

dick's a wizard!

Dick Costolo, CEO of FeedBurner, has launched my new favorite blog, "Ask the Wizard." I've known Dick for years, but when we get together we don't get into Deep Conversations about startup life and competitive strategy; instead we talk shop in the "let's gossip and tell jokes and wonder just how this person manages to attend so many conferences" kind of way.

So I'm thankful he's blogging his CEO / startup experiences, because now I'm learning about a whole other side of Dick.  As in "Holy cow, he really is that smart; I could have sworn he was just faking it." Unless, of course, he's hired a ghost writer and this is just draft work on his way to some unannounced book deal.

Recommended post:  read all about Quantum Hidden Barriers to Entry. Not only his analysis spot on, but he uses the word "quantum," which makes it that much cooler.

schonfeld on widgets

Erick Schonfeld on The Web Widget:

The reason Web widgets are important is because they are the most concrete manifestation of something else that is happening.  The Web is splintering.

Splintering away from the portals, sure, and then reaggregating in places where individual expression happens - blogs, profile pages, etc.  Widgets are another point in the trendline of cut-and-paste culture:  mix and match content and functionality to fit my personality, my blog, my audience.

merry merry