I’ve spent most of today working on something I haven’t done since August 18, 2009: Publish an issue of my old newsletter, Joho.

I started it in around 1995 as an internal up-to-dater for Open Text where I was marketing vp. The idea was to share links, explain some stuff when I could, and crack wise. In other words, it was a lot like a blog that I folded up and sent through email once every few weeks. (In case you were wondering, Joho gets its name from this period: Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization.)

When I left Open Text, I opened up Joho as a free online newsletter. I’d post the hmtl and send out the text. Because we still didn’t have blogs, much of the content consisted of amusing emails from readers, with my occasional semi-amusing riposte.

As the new millennium dawned, I was blogging up a storm and thus felt less of a need — and had less time — to write up articles for a newsletter. And formatting it was a pain in the tuchus. Yes, I know it’s got all the usual hideous elements of my “design aesthetic” (as Jeff Goldenson, who works with me at the Library Innovation Lab, once called it with a straight face). But putting it into that format, and then taking it out so that I could do an ASCII-based version of it for pre-html email took more of a part of a day than I’d like to admit, even after automating as much of it as I could.

But now I’m getting ready to send out another issue. What prompted me was an article I’ve been working on about echo chambers, culture, and Reddit. It’s long for a blog post, but a good length for Joho. And, I have to admit that the publication of a new book undoubtedly is also at least a bit behind my decision to reach out to Joho’s subscribers. Shameful, I know.

I’ll post the linked table of contents here in a few days when I actually send out the newsletter. Until then, I’ll be revising drafts of the three articles in it, and feeling like a young man of 50 again.

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Brian Solis has responded to Jeremy Owyang’s provocative post declaring the end of the golden age of blogging. Here’s the comment I posted on Brian’s site:

I think in a sense it’s true that the golden age of blogging is over, but that’s a good thing. And not because of anything bad about blogging. On the contrary…

Blogging began when your choices were (roughly) to dive into the never-ending, transient conversational streams of the Internet, or create a page with such great effort that you didn’t want to go back and change it, and few could bother to create a different page in order to comment on yours. Blogs let us post whenever we had something to say, and came with commenting built in. The Net was already conversational; blogs let us make static posts — articles, home pages — conversational.

Thanks to that, we now take for granted that posts will be conversational. The golden age ended because when a rare metal is everywhere, it’s no longer rare. And in this case, that’s a great thing.

Yes, that metaphor sucks. An ecosystem is a better one. Since the Web began, we’ve been filling in the environmental niches. We now have many more ways to talk with one another. Blog continue to be an incredibly important player in this ecosystem; thank of how rapidly knowledge and ideas have become part of our new public thanks to blogs. But the point of an ecosystem metaphor is that the goodness comes from the complexity and diversity of participants and their relations. I therefore do not mourn the passing of the golden age of any particular modality of conversation, so long as that means other modalities have joined in the happy fray.

Blogging isn’t golden! Long live blogging! :)

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The NY Times has a terrific article about Media Cloud, a Berkman Center project (hats off to Ethan Zuckerman, Yochai Benkler, Hal Roberts, among others) that will let researchers track the actual movement of ideas through the mediasphere and blogosphere.

Data about concepts! What a concept!

[Tags: berkman media blogs memes research media_cloud ]

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Scott Rosenberg posts the happy news that Rudolf Ammann has found Dan Gillmor’s missing early bloggage for the San Jose Mercury News.

Scott includes a link to Dan’s first post, in 1999. Here are some snippets:

I’ve been thinking about the new ways of journalism, namely the ways the Internet is imposing on all of us. Internet Time has compressed the lives of all kinds of people in all kinds of businesses, and journalism is no exception. In fact, it may be one of the businesses most affected in the long run, both in the opportunities the Net creates and the threat it represents.

So I’m trying one of those new forms. It’s called a “weblog” — and it’s a combination of styles that could exist only on the Web. Text, pictures, hyperlinks and, soon, audio and video are all part of this new form, and I can’t wait to start experimenting with it.

…

Why do I like weblogs? Because the best ones are windows into the Web, various topics and people’s minds. Rather than trying to describe the form, let me show you several of the weblogs I look at daily (or even more frequently):

There’s nobody I admire more than Dan, for his integrity and his prescience.

[Tags: blogging dan_gillmor ]

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Like a fool, until Rebecca Tabasky told me, I didn’t realize that the Berkman Center aggregates blog posts from its fellows and friends and makes them available here.

[Tags: berkman ]

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David Isenberg questions the veracity of the Wall Street Journal’s report about Iran using Nokia equipment to do deep packet inspection. Interesting on its own and also as yet another example of smart bloggers raising journalism’s bar.

[Tags: iran david_isenberg citizen_media journalism media ]

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I just upgraded WordPress (well, BradSucks actually did it for me. Thanks, Brad!) and while I (um, he) was at it, I upgraded to the latest version of Apture. Apture lets you overload a link with whole bunches of information that pop up when a user clicks on it. The new version lets you add the Apture links while you are typing into WordPress’s “Add New Post” edit box, as I’m currently doing. This is more convenient than having to go back through your post to add the Apture links, but, more important, links added while in the edit box get saved locally. So, if Apture should — perish the thought! — someday perish, the links will still work. (If you add more than one destination to an Apture link, as I did for the BradSucks link, only the first one is saved locally, which is a very reasonable solution.)

Apture is free to sites with fewer than 5M page views. The new version also lets you add your own sources of links, in addition to coming loaded with Wikipedia, Flickr, Yahoo search (because Google search doesn’t have the API Apture needs) and a bunch of others.

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The bloggers who write the posts at the White House blog now are putting their names on their posts. I think this is a terrific move.

As I posted a couple of weeks ago, my interest isn’t in accountability. On the contrary. Usually, we think that along the Continuum of Responsibility, putting your name to something will push you toward the Staying In Line side, while being anonymous lets you run toward the Recklessness goal post. But, it doesn’t always work that way. At a site like WhiteHouse.gov, the anonymity of bloggers reinforced the notion that the blog is a faceless voice of authority, with an adjoining door to the Office of Press Releases. I’m hoping that now that the bloggers are signing their posts, they will feel free-er to speak in their own voices, and present shades of view that are a bit more off-angle, and thus more interesting than the Official View. That’s already been true of the posts of the guest bloggers on the site. Now I hope the official bloggers will feel ok about occasionally saying “OMG!!!! I CAN’T BELIEVE I’M IN THE WHITE HOUSE!!!!!!” except maybe a little more constructively and definitely with the caps only implied.

[Tags: white_house whitehouse obama e-gov e-government e-democracy egov blogs anonymity accountability ]

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There’s a really interesting discussion going on at BoingBoing gadgets about the relationship between Wired Magazine and Wired.com. Chris Anderson, the editor of the mag, who turned it off its path of Rich Nerd Fetishism, and has made it interesting and important again, is diving in. It’s great to see this sort of discussion done in public.

[Tags: wired media ]

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The Whitehouse.gov blog continues to improve, by which I mean it’s getting less like the glass-topped version of White House press releases. But it’s missing a big opportunity by keeping the blog posts anonymous.

The White House bloggers seem quite aware that a press release isn’t a post and are trying to create a difference between the two. For instance, the blogger begins the post on President Obama’s speech on credit card reform with a friendly paragraph about the citizen who introduced him. It’s not much and it’s still directly tied to the President’s remarks, but that paragraph doesn’t read like a press release or like a speech. And, that post ends with the blogger’s evaluation of the President’s proposal: “Long overdue.” That last phrase, expressing some personal enthusiasm, is uncalled for, and thus is refreshing, for blogging is a medium for the uncalled and the uncalled-for. (Which is why I love it.)

Still, it’s hard to see how the posts can blow past this minimal level of bloggishness…unless and until the bloggers start signing them.

The problem, I believe, is that the bloggers feel (and are made to feel) the awful weight of speaking for the White House. Their posts come straight from the offices behind the long lawn and the pillared portico. In some weird, ineffable way, they represent the building, its inhabitants, and its policies, just as press releases do. Press releases have authority because they’re not an individual expression. They have authority because they are unsigned and thus speak for the institution itself. Blog posts come from the same building, and, if they’re unsigned, maybe they’re supposed to have similar authority, except written in a slangier style. So, we don’t yet know exactly what to make of these unsigned posts. And neither do the bloggers, I think. It’s too new and it’s too weird.

But, if the bloggers signed their posts, it would instantly become clear that bloggers are not speaking for the institution of the White House the way press releases do. We would have something — the bloggers — that stands between the posts and the awesomeness of the White House. That would create just enough room for the bloggers to express something other than the Official View. They would be freed to make the White House blog far more interesting, relevant, human, and central to the Administration’s mission than even the most neatly typed press releases ever could be.

Already most of the bloggiest posts at Whitehouse.gov come from guest bloggers who are named and identified by their position. They feel free-er to speak for themselves and as themselves, in their own voice. Now, I don’t expect the official White House bloggers to speak for themselves exactly. They are partisans and employees; they work for the White House because they love President Obama. But, if they signed their names, they could speak more as themselves.

This might let them do more of what the White House blog needs to do, in my opinion. For example, I’d like to read a White House blogger explaining the President’s decision to try some Guantanamo prisoners using the military tribunals President Bush created. White House communications officials probably consider it bad politics to acknowledge the controversy by issuing a defense. But bloggers write about what’s interesting, and hearing a spirited, partisan justification would be helpful, and encouraging. I personally think that Pres. Obama probably has good reasons for his decision in this matter, but the “good politics” of official communications are too timid. I want to hear a blogger on the topic. And I would love to learn to go to the White House blog first on questions such as this. And isn’t that where the White House would like me first to go?

Bloggers with names are the best way to interrupt the direct circuit from politics to official public expression. That would put people in the middle…which is exactly where we want them. [Tags: blogs white_house obama blogging media egov e-gov e-government ]

Posted in slightly improved form at HuffingtonPost and TechPresident.

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