Ministry of Intrigue

Photo by golfer4life under a Creative Commons license.

I’ve had to shut off commenting functionality for the time being folks. The spammers have been trying hard to get in, and the code that I’ve written to run comments though Akismet for spam checking is occasionally resulting in a spinning process on the server if it gets too many requests. So, I’m rewriting my spam checking code, and will hopefully finish that up and have commenting functions available again soon.

Those of you who read this site via RSS probably wouldn’t have noticed, but this site had some unexpected downtime this last weekend. My webhost, the always wonderful Webfaction, uses The Planet for at least some of their datacenter services, however there was a nasty hardware failure at the Huston datacenter:

[May 31st] at approximately 5:45 p.m. CDT, a transformer in one of The Planet’s Huston datacentres caught fire, requiring them to take down all of the generators on site on the instructions of the fire department. This is one of six datacentres used by WebFaction. All servers hosted at that datacentre are currently offline.

According to this Slashdot article, the outage apparently affected approximately 9,000 servers. Because of the nature of the fire, and the directives from the fire department, all the redundant power sources were made meaningless, which is kind of a crappy situation. Luckily none of the servers were actually damaged, so when the box that my site is stored on was powered up at about 6:00am this morning, all my data and services came back online with no issues.

I’m not sure if this is a situation that suggests that Webfaction should use a different datacenter, or if this is an example that goes to show that no matter how well you set up contingency plans you are always vulnerable, but I tend to think the latter. Either way, I’m impressed with how responsive Webfaction was during this event, and I’ll continue to use them as my web host.

The important thing is that the site is online and I’m back.

It appears that I have written myself into a corner here.

When I first started this site back in 2004, I intended it just as a writing exercise. It was supposed to be a place where I would publish daily in order to build discipline as a writer. I had just completed a semester in the Undergraduate Nonfiction Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, and so a lot of my early entries were the sort of literary nonfiction that was emphasized in that program. It was originally an anonymous Blogspot site, so that I would write comfortably and without inhibition. It was a great exercise, and I wrote a few entries that I was proud of.

Eventually, I decided to drop the pseudonym. My friends had mostly figured out what I was up to, and the more I thought about the importance of owning your words, the sillier the idea of pseudonymous writing became. So I dropped the pseudonym and shortly afterwords purchased my domain name and set up a proper Wordpress installation. Everything was fine at first, but I found I slowly became more cautious in my writing. I’m not talking about the nastiness that usually begins to accompany anonymity (per this theory), but rather that I took less risks with my writing.

I began writing far more structured pieces, less personal and more review or tutorial oriented. Those pieces also attracted the most attention from other people, which encouraged me to write more posts in that vein. Because I am a geek, a lot of that writing was focused around tech topics, although I continued to review books and movies. I actively resisted the Ministry of Intrigue being classified as another “tech” site, although I was advised by several people online that the lack of focus made it difficult to get traffic. I also couldn’t control how other people described the site, and because I loved geeking out on technology, the “tech” label stuck.

Eventually I accepted it and while I occasionally covered other topics, I started thinking of the site as a place devoted to tech and even began describing it that way. At first this was just fine, because I love talking about technology and I’m into this stuff. However, over time I found that I was writing less and less, as I struggled with writing posts that did more than contribute to the echo-sphere.

A change was needed, and conveniently I had just discovered Django, so I rewrote my site using it. In part this was an exercise to learn the framework, partly to build a CMS tailored to my needs, and in part to procrastinate on writing content. Once the site was built, it allowed me to do link-blogging, which was a great way for me to do quick commentary on stories that came to my attention, without requiring the effort of writing a longer post. Writing longer posts requires a particular level interest on my part, and when possible I try to skip doing so for stories that have already been talked to death around the web.

Here’s the deal though: I never wanted to be a “tech blogger.”

I wrote myself into an unwanted pigeonhole, and I’ve been stuck in it for quite a while. Everybody knows that the only way out of any type of hole is to crawl out of it, and it’s high time that I do that. So, I’m going to start shifting the focus of this site, back to the more general category of “assorted geekery.” I’m sure there will still be plenty of tech stuff, because I’m interested in it, but I’m going to start writing more often on other topics as well, and hopefully get back to doing more pieces that flex the right side of my brain.

In addition to writing, I’m going to start doing some more mixed media stuff, in particular video, although I haven’t ruled audio out yet either. At some point I’ll redesign the site to highlight these new types of content, but for now I’ll just embed them inside of standard entries. I’m still primarily a writer, and unfamiliar with working in these other mediums, so expect plenty of false starts and sloppy beginnings, but over time I hope to improve. The first of these videos, being my awkward introduction to the format, in which I ironically spend a lot of time talking about my site in terms of covering tech, is embedded below.

I don’t know if this new direction is going to go anywhere, but hopefully by allowing myself to experiment and write more freely it will help the site to become more pure.

I hope you will join me on the journey.

A few weeks ago I was having drinks with my good friend Greg, and the topic of social bookmarking came up. I was discussing some of my ideal features in a service, before we got back to the more serious business of catching up. A few days later, Greg sent me a link to Diigo, as it seemed to match a lot of what we were discussing at the time. I took a look at Diigo and was pretty impressed with what I saw, and I decided to give it a go. I’ve been using it full-time for about a week now, and feel comfortable giving you all a review of what I have found.

Diigo has a very attractive and subdued appearance, that is packed with features without being overwhelming.

To begin with, Diigo is an extremely powerful social bookmarking site. Obviously, Diigo does all the things you would expect of this type of service: you can save bookmarks, assign tags to them, and search the site for bookmarks that are also tagged with those terms or find people who have saved the same bookmark. Diigo also allows you to construct “Lists” of links. Lists are another way of structuring your data that you can use in conjunction with tags. Each List can be made up of any group of links that you can sort in whatever order you desire via a drag and drop interface. This is really nice to see a service that still understands that tags are not the end-all be-all of organizing content.

Diigo also allows you to import bookmarks from variety of sources, including Delicious, Magnolia, Simpy, Blinklist, Furl, Connotea, RawSugar and of course, your own browser. The import function worked well for me importing from Magnolia, although Diigo replaced the spaces in my multi-word tags with underscores. Diigo does allow multi-word tags if you encase them in quotation marks, so this was a quick fix, if a little annoying. When will people see the light and do away with space-seperated tags? Just let me use a comma-separated list. Diigo also exports all your bookmarks quite effectively in a variety of formats including RSS, CSV, Delicious format, as well as in formats for both Internet Explorer and Netscape bookmarks.

However, Diigo doesn’t just want to be a bookmarking service, they aim to be a flexible research tool, and allow you to highlight and annotate web pages to provide more directed commentary on what you are bookmarking. These notes can be private for your reference only, or publicly visible to any user. This immediately brings up comparisons to Clipmarks, except that this is very different. Whereas Clipmarks just takes your highlighted content and loads it into their service, Diigo also leaves those annotations in place in the form of highlights and sticky notes that are visible only to Diigo users. This allows you to not only share those annotations on Diigo itself, but also to visit the originating site and see those comments in context of the surrounding content.

An example showing a highlighted annotation with a private sticky note attached.

This annotation feature is particularly powerful when used in conjunction with Diigo’s social features. Diigo allows you to create groups which can be public, private or semi-private, allowing you to collaborate on research through the use of links and annotation. Diigo also allows you to attach notes and comments that are visible only to the group, which is an extremely useful feature when sharing the link both publicly, as well as in a group context.

In addition to collaboration, Diigo’s social side is excellent for content discovery. The service can provide recommended bookmarks from other members based off of the links you have saved in the past, as well as recommending other users whose bookmarking habits seem to match yours. Diigo takes the “social” in social bookmarking very seriously, and provides very effective tools for finding friends on the service, as well as finding new people who have interests similar to your own. Friending another user doesn’t mean just making them a contact, it enables you to generate buddy lists, allowing you to organize sharing of bookmarks with friends, as well as providing a messaging system. Whereas in many other bookmarking services the sharing and social features seem to occur more as a byproduct of the sharing process, Diigo puts those social networking features front and center. However, Diigo’s interface is very content focused as well, making it clear that this isn’t a social network as much as it is a social tool.

Saving content to Diigo is done primarily one of two ways: you can either install the toolbar application, which is available for Firefox, Flock and Internet Explorer, or you can use Diigolet, which is a bookmarklet they provide that should work with almost every major browser.

Examples of bookmarking. The first with the Diigo toolbar in Firefox, and the second using Diigolet in Opera.

The Diigolet is a surprisingly powerful bookmarklet, revealing sticky notes and annotations, as well as providing all the basic functionality a user needs. However, even with my hatred of adding additional rows to my browser window, the Diigo toolbar has won me over and become my tool of choice to interact with the service. Both tools will provide tag suggestions and assist with group functions, as well as the ability to send the link via email, however the toolbar goes even further. When using the toolbar, you also have the option of cross-posting your links to other bookmarking services, or even Twitter if you require. You can save simultaneously to Diigo, Delicious, Magnolia and Simpy, as well as to your own browser’s local bookmarks. Bookmarking to other services seems to work well, and saving to local bookmarks is a particularly awesome experience when using one of the latest betas of Firefox, which will attempt to auto-complete based on both history and bookmarks. It even correctly applies tags in the Firefox Places storage system, which is great but makes me wonder why the toolbar bothers to also build a hierarchal folder system inside Firefox as well, as the tags do that job already.

Another powerful feature that the toolbar adds is the Diigo sidebar:

The Diigo sidebar displaying my recent bookmarks.

As you can see in the above image, the Diigo sidebar allows me to search and browse both my bookmarks and the bookmarks my friends have posted. In addition it allows me to get current information about the page I am viewing via the “This URL” tab. I can access public bookmarks and annotations, and lists of Diigo users who like the site. Diigo also can provide quick metrics about a site that I am visiting via the main toolbar. Using the “About This URL” menu option will provide a overall popularity score for the site, including a breakdown of the number of links to the site from Diigo, as well as from Google, Delicious, Yahoo myweb, Bloglines, Technorati, and Digg. Diigo also provides a calculation of the site’s Google PageRank, which is a really awesome bonus feature that I just discovered today.

Diigo supports OpenID logins, which makes me smile. It would be nice if Diigo allowed you to sign up using just your OpenID, however you need to create a standard account and then associate an OpenID with it. This isn’t a big deal, but it would be a nice enhancement to see in the future.

My only real complaint about Diigo is the lack of an API for developers. I did send them an email regarding this, and was pleasantly surprised to receive email directly from the founders. They indicated that an API is in the works, and were receptive to some of my suggestions in that regard. As I have browsed through the user forums, this seems to be a common practice for the people behind Diigo to actively engage with their users for ideas, and respond constructively to critiques. Diigo does provide RSS for bookmarks, as well as blog widgets, but those weren’t sufficient for my needs. I’ve been able to work around the lack of API by using the toolbar for cross-posting to Magnolia and continuing to use that service for loading bookmarks into my site. However, I am eager for Diigo’s API because this workaround doesn’t allow me to take full advantage of the annotation features when loading the bookmarks into my link blog.

However, when it comes down to it I feel Diigo is really head and shoulders above the majority of competing social bookmarking services in terms of features, and the site itself is certainly more responsive than my beloved Magnolia, which is a wonderful service in itself, but runs slow as molasses. Based on this glowing review, it may come to surprise you I approached Diigo skeptically, even prepared to be antagonistic, but the service managed to win me over. I was unprepared for the seamless integration of Diigo’s social features, as well as the flexibility of the service, which strikes out like a fist of features into the collective nuts of their competition. If the forthcoming API meets the rest of the site’s high standards, you can expect me to be a happy Diigo user for quite some time to come.

Eric Rice recently wrote this post wondering, “How can I stop being called a ‘blogger’?” To summarize, his issue is that it is ridiculous to be labeled by a single medium, especially when the medium is so prevalent that the term becomes meaningless as a categorization tool.

I just feel that label is more a curse than a blessing. While that mind sound drastic, there’s nothing unique about it anymore if everyone does it. (Which is my beef with social media not really being an industry if everyone supposedly does it– maybe we need a ‘breathing industry’?)

For those of you just joining us, the term “blogger” arose for two reasons, the first of those being medium confusion. Blogs aren’t really anything that radical, essentially they consist of a website with dated entries as opposed to a static site that is rarely changed. Some people have added other qualifiers like suggesting something is not a blog with an RSS/Atom subscription feed, which is actually more of a standard practice rather than a requirement. The point is that the idea-form of a blog is essentially just a site composed of dated text that is regularly updated and archived. You could just call it an online journal, as many did back in the day, except that blogs aren’t always personal, nor are they always a column or essay. We had to call it something, after all, it was new, if not exactly an amazing conceptual leap, and “weblog” (shortened to “blog”) was the one that sticked. Obviously, people who wrote to blogs were called “bloggers” because it’s a hell of a lot easier than saying “person who writes on the Internet.”

The second and the biggest reason that it caught on was the fact that since in the beginning there were so few people writing blogs it became an easy way to stitch together some notion of community, and in its own way, blogging began to consider itself a subculture. This worked out well for professionals and others not involved in maintaining blogs because it provided a convenient label for this group that appeared to be forming. Some used it with derision, others confusion or ambivalence, people who called themselves “bloggers” used it with pride. Thus the term “blogger” received a significance that may not have been deserved.

Because here’s the thing: the community doesn’t exist.

That’s right, there is no such thing as a “blogging community”, just like there is no such thing as a “podcaster community”. It’s not real, it’s like saying that all writers, or all television producers (also a group classification based solely on a type of media), or all electrical engineers are a community working together, which is bullshit. Sure there are communities of bloggers, and communities of podcasters, as well as communities that are composites of every group on the map. Those communities form around shared interests, because that’s how people form communities to begin with.

During the whole O’Reilly “Blogging Code of Conduct” hoopla, there was a lot of talk of “preserving our blogging community” or “how terrible bloggers must be” considering how the whole ruckus got started. And it was all ridiculous. The so-called “community” as a whole didn’t exist. People writing blogs are people, and a significant percentage of people (I choose to believe the minority) are assholes.

So, now that I’ve essentially agreed with Eric Rice that the term “blogger” is an outmoded, and somewhat bullshit classification, where does that leave us.

Nowhere.

Let me explain: like Rice, I don’t necessarily relish being called a “blogger.” First, it’s essentially a meaningless term, having more to do with the type of software I use to publish, than any real connection to my content. Secondly, it adds an unnecessary and weird esotericism to what I’m doing, which means people attach additional rider values with that, either positive or negative, that I don’t particularly want or need. If someone asks me, I say that I am, among other things, a writer. Like Rice, I do have /blog in my URL, because that’s what it is, but in conversation I often just refer to it as “my site.”

All that being said, if people decided that what I should be referred to as a “jackass”, there isn’t anything I can do about it. You can ask politely, you can stop using the terms yourself, but honestly, people are going to call you whatever they want to. All you have a choice about is how you define yourself.

Now, blogs are starting to become more mainstream as they enter pop culture, although if you believe that everyone understands what a blog is you are seriously deluding yourself, and should spend more time with people who aren’t on the Internet all the time. However, there is still a major disconnect between print/broadcast media and online media for the overwhelming majority of people. Until Internet connectivity and consumption of content becomes so ubiquitous that people don’t have that disconnect (which will happen but is a long way off), the term “blogger” or something like it is going to be here.

Which brings us to Eric Rice’s final point and question:

And out there, in scary, scary normal people land, explaining this takes time away from talking about content and talking about definitions.

How can I (or you) talk about the next great idea if we have to spend so much time explaining the lingo?

I think it’s pretty clear that I think the lingo is here to stay regardless of what people want, but honestly it doesn’t help that when bloggers (see I use it too, ha!) attach such importance to it. And, just to be fair, that includes writing posts about whether or not you want to be called a “blogger.” If you have a problem with it, don’t make it important. You can change the terms you use, or not, it honestly doesn’t matter, and things won’t change until this imaginary community identity begins to leave the public’s association with that word. Identify yourself however you feel most comfortable, but remember that arguing the point either way just strengthens the term’s hold in the minds of your readers/viewers. Labels only have the significance that we (people) are willing to give them.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to take a shower as all this meta makes me feel dirty.