Jeffrey asks if we're still excited about "blahgs". My answer: Not as much. Our content is all starting to look the same because of the tools used to manage it and web-two-point-dough has homogenized the Internet.
Before there were blogs we had websites. Beautiful, random websites that felt more like a zine — one page looking nothing like the one before or after it — or Wired magazine back in the early days when Jane Metcalf was art directing. Clicking through a website hosted on Geocities was like playing Russian roulette with your eyes but those horrid pages with disco backgrounds, flaming horizontal rules, and BLINK tags would look more like art today than poorly designed website because we're so used to seeing boxy newsletters (this site included). Content was in free-form, one page might contain a paragraph set in headline tags and the next would be five pages set in nine-point type. Sure it was sometimes frustrating but it certainly wasn't boring. Today's content-tied-to-ads web is very bland in comparison and we desperately need to rediscover the ways of our old, accidental bohemian community.
When content is forced through a entry-commment-trackback-pagerank strainer it all comes out looking the same no matter how the templates are designed. Sure this format is functional but it's more like a Maersk shipping container than a Volvo s50. This is fine for commercial purposes, the blog is certainly the must-have online marketing device, but I miss those days when content wasn't confined to categories, calendars, and links to vote a piece of content into a popularity contest.
Yes, I'm talking about the old days through rose-colored glasses. Managing the sites of yesteryear was nerve-racking and difficult, God forbid if you ever wanted to change the design (many a weekends were lost, glued to the computer going through pages and pages of cut-and-pasting content into new HTML wrappers). The affordable CMS thankfully has brought an end to that. The new challenge is to find a way to manage content while creating a space free of repetitive form. Of course this is possible, anything is possible, and it's my hope that I'm not alone in this quest.
But design can only take content so far.
Everyday brings more blogs and more links to the same content found through the same feeds and social networks. Web-two-crap has monetized everything from the online video to the RSS feed. Quantity over quality has taken over and instead of getting the best out of people we're getting the watered down product published in hopes of being popular for a day, maybe only minutes, but enough to increase links-in, links-out, page views, click-throughs, and ad revenue. Instead of having a wonderful cable community channel we're stuck with the Gong Show. And that's it, there's no going back. I have a hard time wanting to be a part of that universe anymore. We didn't like it when we were all forced through this in high school so
why are we putting up with it now. Unfortunately I don't see the web reversing course anytime soon.
I remember when it would take months for the web to churn through the next new meme or weird link. Now it takes a matter of days, sometimes hours. Digg, YouTube, and Myspace have made content a popularity contest that has crept into blogs, even this one.
In 2002 there was a lot of excitement about the independent web. The fallout from the .com era had passed and those still left standing were anxious and making plans for the return of the non-commercial web. Blogs certainly played a major part in helping bring that initiative online and started the self publishing movement. It's my hope that as another four years have passed and again money, and now monotony, have crept back into our content that we'll all keep at least a little part of what we do free from what has become blahgs.
Join the fray by reading through and commenting at the end.
Just a comment on this bit of goo:
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many a weekends were lost, glued to the computer going through pages and pages of cut-and-pasting content into new HTML wrappers
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Even with CMS goo and CSS goo, if you're reworking a website in any significant way it's likely you're changing and updating the content as well, and somebody still needs to enter that content, no matter what. Sadly, there still isn't a magic content button, some monkey gets stuck copy/pasting/formatting/tweaking.
To read between the lines of your post, it would seem that what we're missing the most are two things, attention and craft. The old "news cycle" of the web was much longer, and ideas took longer to percolate - probably because connections between websites and their central memes were exponentially fewer then. The wiring of these "neurons" was a lot simpler; now it's a lot more complex, which means more noise and less signal. As to the craft aspect, there was a sort of scrapbooky quality to early web design (and I mean that as a compliment), or to take a food metaphor, it was like Slow Food vs. fast food. Now with a CMS the chef and saladier are out, instead we've grafted the assembly-line efficient backend of a McDonald's onto a variety of restaurants that may not actually need them. And, of course, there's the ceaseless hunger for new, new, new content which can make even the most modest blogger white with blank-page anxiety.
I sense a change in the wind: a great Rollin' And Tumblin' is a coming. Just another chapter of our Modern Times, as his Bobness would say.
My sense Mr. Storey is that what will transpire is the Voice and voices of "Blughs". But great voices remain and endure. A year ago I used to follow a couple of dozen Blogs ... now it's down to less than 8. I have whittled down to quality. Greg, your doing fine lad.
you have certainly provided much to respond to...i was actually thinking about this today (and many days before today): 10 years ago everyone had a "website", whether it be geocities or a free university hosted account, everyone had their little "corner of the web." (note: i had one of these)
then people realized that maintaining a website can be a pain, keeping it constantly updated with your photos, updates, recipes, bowel movements is not worth it for the 2 monthly readers (mom & dad). (note: my mom and dad are the only people who read my site)
so the whole "personal website fad" died off slowly. funnily enough, as the "grass roots" were abandoning the web as a personal publishing platform, mass media was just starting to grasp the concept, and starting flooding the web with ads, ad-driven sites, ad-driven ads, and ads about driving ads!
meanwhile, the blogging/RSS revolution began. finally a way for non-techies to publish their thoughts and feelings without needing to learn HTML, CSS, httpd, ftp, etc! now, instead of "websites" we all got "blogs".
which brings me to your point regarding the homogenous design of everything. i, too, remember the "good old days" where you had to guess where the navigation was. "if i click on that logo, will it bring me to the homepage, or send me somewhere else?" it seems some people (i'd like to know WHO) got together and decided, "y'know, most users expect navigation to be in a consistent place, and links to look like links, and text to be larger than 6px"...and the rest of the web followed suit. now it's all large header images, with navbars right below then a content/sidebar area. (note: my current blog has a large header image with a topnav and a content/sidebar area!)
my point being, i think we are at the opposite end of the spectrum from 10 years ago.
the web is a medium in need of a happy medium!
I miss the days where it was all about the graphics. Heavy graphics and flash, no semantic html and css wasn't really used as it is today. And everyone was on modem. Now everyone has broadband and it's all about making skinny sites, nothing wrong with that, but the graphical content and spontaneity of each page was like an exploration. Rather than being another page full of text that you click away from if it's not interesting within the first 5 seconds, even though "content is king" that's another money hungry thing that's come with the new trends as well.
I miss skilla.com and the 100s of other great graphical sites that used to own the net. Some of them are still there, but they've been converted to the new way of doing things.
I say we start a mutiny.
Graphics are great, in the correct context. Flickr or Superbad.com are not nytimes.com, for instance. It would be awfully annoying to try to scan any major news site if it was done up in blackletter fonts and illuminations vs. clear photos + Helvetica. There's always going to be a place for the pure art site or the experiential Flash site (band or movie sites, for instance) that can throw the lean-and-mean-and-clean rules out the window.
hmm, I think what the medium might be stilted by, to some extent, is the limiting nature of blogging tools. For the more advanced user who doesn't want everything in their site to be based on the same template, there's things like ExpressionEngine. Best of both worlds - really flexible output with the convenience of a CMS.
I've lamented this sort of thing myself, both in terms of personal sites and news sites (which I deal with in my day job). In both cases, sites today are very templated. One blog post looks like the next, one story looks like the next, and so on.
This has it's advantages from a usability perspective, but it has really hurt the art of crafting a page layout around the content that going to go into it. Web designers, by and large, don't design pages, they design sites. They don't layout stories, they layout templates. This is a bit sad to me.
I think the main reasons for this are twofold:
1. Online, there is such an incredible emphasis placed on immediacy. In the news world, it's the expectation that when we have a story, we break it. We don't take the time to layout a hand-crafted page for it -- we break the damn story, like now. In print, news designers at least usually have several hours before deadline to whip up a layout for their stories in tomorrow's paper.
2. The vast majority of content management tools simply don't allow for it. If you're lucky enough to be working with a system that gives you full control over the (X)HTML output to begin with, you likely only have one template available to you per type of content (i.e. one blog entry template, on story template, and so on). If your system allows for multiple template, it's unlikely it does so in a graceful manner that allows you to craft new layouts quickly without duplicating repetitive bits of code. One needs to be able to whip up designs for a story very quickly to meet the deadlines mention above.
Bottom line: deadlines and tools don't make it very practical to manage content well and create engaging sites that don't look incredibly templated from one page to the next. We were able to do the designs we used to do because we weren't managing content well, and thus weren't restricted by the limitations of our CMS template systems.
As someone who works for a company producing a leading news CMS and someone who built a personal CMS and is in the process of re-working it, I can tell you these are problems people are working on solving. But it's not a simple problem.
Wilson Miner once said to me, in a conversation about this topic, something to the effect of, "the real trick is not designing pages -- it's designing the content management system that really lets designers design pages."
This is why I hate RSS. People don't even go to my actual site anymore. I swear my next site will be PNG posts with flattened text. Suck it!
I'm sticking with my Safari folders and the awesome expand button... Cuz I love me some website action! Note to self - don't cooment on blogs at 3 am! Thanks for the dealine distraction.
Jim - I agree, i've started to get sick of using a feedreader as you don't even get to see the site and when there are 100 sites in your list to check they tend to lose their identity. Sure they have their name, but it's the design that you really remember.
Feedreaders are great for organisation and i will continue to use one, but if i see a good title i click it to take me to the site because i'd rather read it in the way intended than read every site in the same bland style.
As for CMS's it's definately important to have something that's highly customisable, something that you can have a different design per page, per category, per whatever you want as it's your site. The limitations of making a default header, footer and content section and using a CMS to manage just the content is quite dull.
It really comes down to the site's creator and how far they are willing to go to make the site really something special as opposed to something that's just got great content. It seems though that most are caught in this rut of thinking about the content and that's as far as it goes (I would be included at this point in time).
It will happen though, the old and the new are coming together and when they marry at the right point it will be a match made in heaven.
The "problem" right now - and the essence of it all imo - is that nowadays everyone can start a blog by entering an e-mailaddress and then clicking some buttons ... back in the days (talking about 2001 here when I started out), only those who were technically able to do it (thus those who could set up an existing package, or write their own).
That resulted in the fact that only 10.000 pll used to blog back then. Now there are millions of people blogging (these figures are used to resemble the difference, they're not real). The subjects to write on however haven't grown that fast over the years, resulting in the non-exclusiveness of content when one blogs something - where your post starts with.
wbr,
B!
Great article. Which in it's existence embodies what I like about blogs - A considered article that is thought out and covers an interesting issue. I recently looked at Netdiver for the first time in ages, and enjoyed the amount of visual creativity. For me the mechanisation of website creation is very useful but won't ever answer the question of why you want one in the first place.
Fantastic post. I don't so much mind the 'templating' as I do the ProBlogger "10 Ways To Write A 10 Ways List" and "How To Write Better HOWTOs". All content these days seems to have to be filtered into an easily digestable list.
I used to enjoy it when blogs were about conversation, but we've all become swept up in the PageRank/Adsense/Stat Junkie revolution (myself included), and it's just not fun anymore.
Well said, Greg. I also like aj's summary:
To read between the lines of your post, it would seem that what we're missing the most are two things, attention and craft.
> ...it would seem that what we're missing the most are two things, attention and craft.
Precisely. Does anyone else recall Derek's article on blogs from many years back? The irony is that it wasn't a blog post at all but a hand coded document with custom artwork, layout, etc.
> Greg, your doing fine lad.
Thanks Vanni.
> I miss the days where it was all about the graphics. Heavy graphics and flash, no semantic html and css wasn't really used as it is today.
While it wasn't all graphics, The 1999 Nagano Winter Olympics website by Studioarchetype is still my absolute favorite of all time.
> One needs to be able to whip up designs for a story very quickly to meet the deadlines mention above.
The first version of this site included extra markup so as to run my own personal Zen Garden. With enough nested DIV tags creating layouts on the fly is doable. Not practical, but then again I hand markup type treatments and unordered list styles in-line anyway. Craft takes time, there are no shortcuts.
You touch on something I've been thinking more and more about lately. The web seems to be getting less diverse instead of the other direction. The tools we use to publish (blog, blahg, BLAARGH!) have made our jobs so darn easy, it's almost ridiculous. With more ease should come more time to focus on content. Yet I think the opposite is true: with more ease we find ourselves less involved in the writing process. Writing has become free flowing thought.
A distinction has been made between blogging and writing. Due to circulation and the ease at which we can tap our audience, we don't have to worry about writer deadlines, editing, perhaps even a spell check or two. Writing on the Internet is much harder to find these days. Truly. A coherent, precise article on a topic is much harder to find then, say, a rant on why Republicans are nothing but poopy-pants. What happened if the majority of bloggers switched job titles and started writing. I'm making it a point to focus more on writing at my own site (when it's finished, I know I know). It's certainly not an easy thing, to write full thoughts on screen, but I believe the challenge and rewards are much greater.
To switch gears, I was thinking the other day about the visual side of the Web before Web 1.0. Geocities...my God. I think myspace is the new geocities. Just as ugly, slightly more versatile and fewer ads. Again, with better and more versatile tools for people to publish, I think our options to diversify a web site have diminished rather than increased. Woop, flickr pics on the left column. Talkbacks. Technorati. Delicious. Digg it! Seems like, while these tools are simply awesome, it leaves practically every blog with the aspirations to be truly versatile looking the same as every other blog.
But in the end it's really up to the developers and designers to keep things interesting. Just like an election, you can only blame yourself for the outcome. It pretty much rests in our collective hands to not fall into a circle. Thought it seems time tells we get stuck in a "look" (ahem, reflections) for awhile, turn spin cycle on, then in a few years suddenly leap forward to the next asthetic.
Well fooey, I'm off to update my flickr account.
You're right: the web has become the Tower of Babel. A million speaking at once and no one listening.
Slickly designed or slapped together, a blog (or any web site, for that matter) matters because its author(s) have something to say or show. Otherwise, it's just simple-minded narcissism.
> the web has become the Tower of Babel. A million speaking at once and no one listening.
As I recall God didn't like the Tower of Babel one bit. Destroy Myspace before we are smitten!
Like I said to Jeff.
Why do we blog?
As for the rest of your post, I heartily agree. Web 2.0 and 37s is killing independent thought as fast as the dot-com boom did.
If I may be bold and condense Blake's four paragraphs of prose into one nicely crafted thought: designers shoudn't blog.
Just like: writers shouldn't design (I think y'all would agree with that).
Jim and Mick touch on something important, the rss feed is so stripped down it removes the design. maybe the next version of RSS can actually grab the whole page (optionally) to be presented in the reader... so you have the options of Rich RSS, Regular and Lite (summaries only).
> Quantity over quality has taken over and instead of getting the best out of people we're getting the watered down product published in hopes of being popular for a day, maybe only minutes, but enough to increase links-in, links-out, page views, click-throughs, and ad revenue. Instead of having a wonderful cable community channel we're stuck with the Gong Show.
This video [Ze Frank] summarizes this phenomenon nicely. See this? This is me agreeing hard.
I have a personal hate of people that blag just to be popular. The sheer signal vs. noise ratio of blags is getting unbearable. As such, feedreaders are almost becoming essential to filter out all the crap.
That said, please visit my blag! Being a hypocrite is a sweet gig.
I think the rather unforgiving nature of blog audiences is a deterrent to quality sometimes. If you don't post something often enough, people go away. I find myself looking for ways to post more often, not post better.
Boy does this strike a chord! I have had a personal website onlien since '95. I used to look or ways to "spruce it up" with downlaodable graphics or colour variations. As it matured a bit I even had different sections with their own "theme" as you suggest.
Somewhere along the line it became more homogeneous and one "theme" got carried through the whole site. Postings were tidbits of information or an editorialization and the only comments wer the occasional feedback e-mail or guestbook entry.
Now that I have a nice pair of peronal "blogs" I spend some time working on nice (think) designs for, learned a new CMS for it and try and keep them more up to date with cotnent than the old site, I'm not sure I'm getting any more readers - or even if anything is better or worse than before.
Maybe, to mis-quote a song by Kansas, it's all just dust in the wind.
Somehow I doubt there is little that can be done to rescue the blog format from the blog format. It is what it is but that doesn't mean that you or I have to push content through a blog format.
I'm thinking that craft (my new word of the day) doesn't come through filling out forms.
AJ, were you joking? If the RSS feader pulled the design into the RSS feed, then why in the hell would you want an RSS reader. That's called a browser? At least Safari.
I do use an RSS site: NetVibes but it's for news and tech sites. I will never add my design friends in there.
I think one of the downfalls that RSS and the CMS bring is that we won't be breaking too much design ground like we did. You have to admit the web got cleaned up for the most part from 2000 to now. 6 years is quick! I predict all that social bizness will get some innovations, but design innovations will creep. No one has to build from scratch anymore.
Hell, we can just steal CederMoll's work (or is it Mollholm?) and say we are doing custom work! Let's open a bottle of Falkner and toast to the lame web!
Jim: yes, i was joking-- in an extremely subtle, almost subliminal way. But in the sense of 'kidding on the square' I guess I'm complaining about the fact that browsers aren't great newsreaders and vice versa (why is NNW's built-in browser so slow?) and I kinda wish someone would hybridize the two a little further. I would like the ability to have this "newsbrowser" toggle some sort of background pre-caching of pages on selected feeds, for instance, so I can have the actual page loaded up for viewing in full - and others can just load the usual rss text...unless there's something out there that does that already?
I think this has a lot to do with the mainstreaming of the internet over the past few years. The early adopters were techies, cutting edge creative types, or people who felt highly motivated to get their thoughts out on the web. This created an early web that was full of experimentation and eccentricity.
Now that the web has been mainstreamed, you see more mainstream interests taking center stage: popularity for popularity's sake, short attention spans, and weblogs that are just as aimless as the real lives they represent (not to get too haughty here). But for every digg horde and Facebook fiasco, there's an Airbag, Zeldman, or Ze Frank. Now, however, just like in real life, you have dig a little deeper to find the gems.
I maintain my personal site (which I largely refuse to call a blog) for my own reasons. Whenever I post, I try to make sure it's something that a stranger wouldn't mind reading. On a good week I get 70 visitors, and I'm okay with that. Still, er, I really wouldn't mind if you checked out my site. :-)
Jon - I just checked out your site *cough* blog. So there's another visitor for you. :)
As for the CMS stuff, i've just been reading an interesting article at Think Vitamin that relates to what's been said here.
http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/blogs/redefining-content-management
> Clicking through a website hosted on Geocities was like playing Russian roulette with your eyes but today those horrid pages with disco backgrounds, flaming horizontal rules, and BLINK tags would look more like art today than poorly designed website...
This does still exist, now we just call it MySpace but unlike geocities, you seem to always get the bullet.
I'm hoping for the content management system that lets me bend and shape my sites in unique shapes and forms, but without the learning curve of django or expression engine. Yeah, I know I should suck it up and learn, but just the thought of it makes me want to take a nap.
Greg: I agree. I designed my site as a static design and then moved it over to the CMS. I enabled comments but needn't have bothered. I don't get any. Must be my dry uninteresting style, boring topics or both :)
Jonathan: I refuse to call mine a blog most of the time too. And you got another visitor. :)
Damon: I used to enjoy looking at the variations on Geocities. That was the early days of the popularization of the Web and people were still experimenting. There were the occasional eye watering designs but even they were good for a chuckle. Myspace is boring by comparison.
Steph: Try Textpattern. I found the curve shallow and the structure middling unrestrictive. A simpler, cheaper EE :)
> This does still exist, now we just call it MySpace but unlike geocities, you seem to always get the bullet.
Agreed.
> I'm hoping for the content management system that lets me bend and shape my sites in unique shapes and forms, but without the learning curve of django or expression engine.
It's out experience that Expression Engine is the simplest of all to install and modify. Django looks promising as well but we haven't come across a need to use it yet.
With CMS like pligg, which give you a digg like site, I have a feeling, that might be the direction blogs are headed. More than anything, this would enable lurkers to impact posts and comments, and add a new twist to blogs.
Awesome post. I can't disagree with any part.
I guess the next step is to 'graduate' from our four years in 'high school' and move on to better things.
I kinda hope that includes more personality to a person's web presence; more individual designs, content, links that mean something; and less popularity contest from the big guys. I'm tired of it.
The time for the early adopter is over for sure. With ton's of software being delivered over the web there is simply no choice but to be exposed to the throngs of n00bs and part time internet users. It's unfortunate but it seems for now the dream is on hold (again)
Arse about tit, I'm afraid. If you run something as a popularity contest it becomes a popularity contest. Check out the circularity there. Or if you prefer, substitute 'behave' for 'run'. Either will work equally well. And both have been clearly demonstrated here, and elsewhere, on so many happy occasions. While of course what you end up moaning about then is the discernment of the masses. Which particular discernment you can batter about its head with your comedy mallet as often as you like, only to find it hauling itself back up off its fat, vapid ass laughing, or not, every time. Of course, one never knows. Perhaps it will be a little less fat the next time around. Or even fatter. Here's hoping.
funny...I was thinking about this the other day when I was planning a new blaghin app. I miss the 1997 geocities sites, the hand rolled site, this is me sites, and of course the "(fill in the blank) ate my #$%&'s" sites.
I want to create software for how I envision my site, the web...the content may be constant, but I want everything random. including the stylesheets, layouts, images. Click from one page to the next and everything is different, and never the same.
I dont have time to roll pages everyday by hand, nor do I have enough to say. But the ease of a blahging engine that allowed for page to page differences without the force everything in the same mold would be cool.
Eventually I plan to roll it my way, where comments go horizontal, and vertical, post comments on comments, or comments on posts. more like a forum, and less like I said this first, you said that next, and he said that about what I said and nothing about what you said.
The primary reason I use an RSS feedreader is because I won't remember to keep up on a blog otherwise. I'll recall it three months later, and then the conversation on the comments has blown off. I mean, if I want to unplug, then I'll unplug, but if I don't want to, I don't want to be forced to.
If you want people to come to your site instead of using a reader, maybe you should have content that is worth seeing outside of the feed. A great design is well and good, but what is it designed for? If it's just artwork, stuff it in a museum and we'll get an RSS for that someday.
Oh, and my Geocities site is still around. I put a link to it in my high school yearbook as my senior quote. It's still as crazy as I was back then.
> I think the rather unforgiving nature of blog audiences is a deterrent to quality sometimes. If you don't post something often enough, people go away. I find myself looking for ways to post more often, not post better.
in a general question to everyone:
why do you care if you have visitors to your blog? what the poo does it matter? if you want to make friends join a soccer league. if you want to make business contacts go to a meetup. call your grandma -- ask her what she thinks about your blogging. two cents says she thinks you're goofy.