history lessons Archives | Ian M Rountree

Blogging With Rock Skis On

May 6, 2011 by Ian 4 Comments

When I was learning to ski for biathlon in the mid-nineties, I didn’t start with expensive, awesome tools.

My first skis weren’t full-capped Rosignols, my first boots weren’t high-end Solomons. My skis, boots, and poles were hand-me-downs. We called these hand-me-downs rock skis because they’d been chewed up with use, and having lost bits of their undersides to rocks on the nearly off-season tracks at the end of the previous year. They sucked – but using them convinced me I was worth better tools.

I spent the first season on that hand-me-down set of equipment, struggling through every foot of snow. Don’t even get me started on my rifle – cadet issue vostock .22 caliber rifle, the only left-sighted rifle the squadron had. It was a pain to sight in, and had a single-shot action, which meant I lost time reloading for each shot manually.

Learning to succeed without the benefit of skill-enhancing tools is important. I worry that not as many people go through this process as used to especially for creating media.

When bloggers are new to the game these days, they’ve got access to ways to make themselves immediately awesome, like;

Premium themes
Self-hosted wordpress blogs
All the tutorials you could want
Expert advice in a plethora of LinkedIn communities, Facebook groups, and paid areas like ThirdTribe and Blog Topics
Plugins like ScribeSEO to handle their editorial foibles
With just a couple hundred dollars, today’s media creator can look like they’re launching the next Problogger or Copyblogger – whether they can back up the awesomeness of the design and platform with their content or not.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing.

Being able to set ourselves up to create excellence from day one is awesome – however, it’s incomplete as an experience. Some of the best bloggers out there have been around for a long time – experience counts for some of their innate awesomeness, but there’s another part that comes from having started with rock skis.

When I started blogging in the late nineties, all we had was LiveJournal. What we now call RSS, back then was LJ’s friends system. Those of us who spent a lot of time creating content created what we called a ping-free environment; because computers weren’t that great at running a lot of programs, we’d turn on Winamp, and turn off our messengers, and just write. By having nothing but our soundtracks and our text boxes available to us (we didn’t even have tabbed browsing back then – the horror), we were blogging with rock skis on. We were working with the best tools available, and gaining very specific skills because of that.

We can sill blog with rock skis today, if we try!

Some of the best new bloggers I’ve seen began on wordpress.com or blogger, before moving on to bigger and more extensible platforms. Working with these very tightly specified tools is like learning to write with the AP guide – you’ve only got so many chances to look awesome without artificial reinforcement, and you have to take every opportunity to be recognized as doing good work.

Blogging with rock skis on these days has to be intentional – the way not going out and buying a brand new set of Solomon boots is for new biathletes.

I’m not advocating for every would-be blogger to deprive themselves of great tools. However, there’s only so far those tools can take us without knowing what their functions are, and where the enhancements are actually coming from.

Every so often, turn off all the perks – write the hard way, ping-deprived – and see how much you can improve your practices with some rock skis.

How far can we take this improvement? What do you think?

Has Blogging Left Its Own Sub-Culture?

January 19, 2010 by Ian 5 Comments

There’s a shift going on in the media, a swinging pendulum action towards new formats, new mediums and new procedures. In many ways, this change toward Say Anything, Publish Cheap behaviour is a good thing – but what is it doing to the community that started out here, back in the day? Are bloggers – those once-prolific mavericks who paved the way for the current layer of professionals – being abandoned because of their own success?

When I started on LiveJournal in 1999 as a lark, blogging was considered a downer idea, even among the group of supergeeks I hung out with at the time.

The entire idea behind the LJ – for me, for us – began as a way to gather up all of the work we were doing in collaborative fiction and drop it semantically into a self-organizing, self-publishing venue. There had already been, for nearly four years, a newsletter going out weekly (or sometimes monthly) with updates, but the sudden power to have everything in one place, not just the stuff that was big enough to make the Alamak News, as it were, was a trip all on its own.

But then blogging caught on. The power base shifted from the small group of very experienced players to everyone who the moderators let join the group. And once that happened, the players in some cases even forwent the group blog and published on their own journals, in some cases very elaborate parallelisms to the major game.

We all thought that was a problem.

Then, it got worse.

The trouble was, originally, that Alamak was very hostile towards role-players acting in public. Being that the site was a dominant online chat at the time, and supported nearly eight hundred people during peak hours (bear in mind this is 1999) many of whom were monetarily supporting the chat through subscription-based, privileged accounts, it was a big deal that this small group of less than fifty people were trying to change the way the chat ran, in certain areas. Those of us with Mod accounts (subscription accounts) in some cases ended up under scrutiny for being players. It was frowned on. We were keeping the lights on, and being discriminated against.

So what happened? A small splinter of the players actually went and began their own chat, called Winds of Change. You’d think this was a good thing, but it wasn’t. The break actually caused a schism between a number of the veteran players, because the rules at WoC were so very communist in the Stalinist sense, that some newer players never had a chance of acceptance. WoC meant no harassment for those of us serious enough to play – but it also killed community growth, because the only way in was referral, and if you didn’t have the chops to be a good player from the get go, you were effectively shunned, or worse, humiliated.

WoC died. It became a nepotistic echo chamber with very little innovation. Add to that issues with the admins, the developers who closed the site down eventually – the whole thing became such a crapshoot that those of us who weren’t invested in it left with little protest. When those who remained until the final days tried to reintegrate themselves, the entire community seemed to jump the shark as a whole.

Fast forward.

Some of us still entranced by collaborative fiction have done some things with it. One of my fellow players and I are launching a blog-book in February called The Dowager Shadow. I still roleplay, when I get a chance – I’m hoping to organize a reunion game for the old Alamak crowd sometime this year – but I’m a little distressed by what I see when I go into any of the now many roleplayer-centric chat sites there are on the net. I see a lot of the behavior that caused WoC to fail, only on a much bigger scale; what used to be five uppity vets bashing twenty uppity newbs is now a few dozen uppity vets bashing a few hundred uppity newbs. It’s not just ten to one scale, here either. It’s happening on every site out there. It’s fifty, a hundred, a thousand to one the level and volume of pride, wickedness and cruelty that was present eleven years ago in the original games.

The same thing might happen to personal publishing!

If you watch the trends, the schism began a long time ago, but there’s no cultural commentary on it yet because the culture hasn’t caught up to itself. Speaking in the analogy, the blogging equivalent of WoC doesn’t even exist yet. But the trend is there, the behaviors that those of us who watched saw in the small group of vets is beginning to show up again in the blogging culture.

Make Us Better, We’ll Pay For It!

First, there were the bloggers – the unshaven basement rats, eviscerating people who wronged them in the darkness of their parents’ basements. Then there were the journalists and the analysts, the Clay Shirky’s of the world who saw the trend for what it was and got in on the ground floor. Fast forward a few years, and now we’re seeing tutors, gurus, veterans of all kinds popping up and using whatever tools are at their disposal to help or hinder everyone they can lay their hooks into. Just like what happened with Winds of Change, the business has begun to underscore the culture, and if we’re not careful, the business will eventually tire of us, and move elsewhere. And where will that leave those vets who changed with the winds, who followed the money and did nothing but the new, shiny thing?

Before the Business Leaves You, Leave the Business!

There’s an opportunity for us to learn from past mistakes and adjust the model as we’re going, rather than abandoning the pleasure yacht and moving on to the Titanic. As Liz Strauss recently said in an interview with Mitch Joel for the Six Pixels Podcast, the major difference between hiring a fresh, fast-texting digital native and a dyed in the wool expert isn’t scale of skill, it’s the ability to make decisions because of a habit of success and appropriate self-scrutiny that can’t be bought in college, and must be earned through real world trauma and experience. (I may be paraphrasing you there, Liz, but there we are, that’s what I heard.)

Many of the bloggers I know are intensely dedicated professionals. Not necessarily as bloggers, but I’ve seen an approach to technology and its impacts on our culture that visibly, palpably feels like dyed in the wool decision making experts. So I’ll put it to you this way, any of you who are getting in at the beginning of the business:

Are you going to ride out the storm without preparing for the wind to leave your sails?

Or are we going to effect some change and kill the buzz, replacing it with something appropriate, useful, and over all, enduring?

Photo by tibchris.

you can’t tell me this doesn’t mean something

January 1, 2010 by Ian 19 Comments

Every so often, some luddite troll pops up and barks about how relationships formed on the internet don’t mean anything. I need you to not believe them. Why? Well, I have a story to tell you.

I’m very good at forming relationships online. Having read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers this month, I did some quick math. Gladwell asserts that to be an expert at something you need to accumulate ten thousand hours working at it in a concerted manner. I’ve said before that I’ve been online for nearly half my life. Much of this, between 1999 and 2003, was spent developing, maintaining and curating a freely built, all-players-included rule free fantasy fiction universe. Four years. Given that I graduated High School in 2001 and spent the next two years doing nothing but building this world for ten to sixteen hours a day, I think it’s safe to say I know what I’m talking about. Ten thousand hours happens when you’re working eight hours a day, five days per week. At this point, I expect I’m nearing a hundred thousand hours actively cultivating my environment online. I’ve made a lot of friends.

I nearly proposed to a girl I met online. My co-author for The Dowager Shadow, who lives in England and who I’ve never met (yet) naturally, met me online. I’d met more people from this roleplay during it’s golden age than I had in most of the last two years of school. From this group of people, one family really stood out.

When I needed to escape from a very bad life situation in the summer of 2003, one of my friends – a New Yorker living in Windsor, Ontario at the time, named Dave – offered to take me in. I flew down. Lived there for six months while the fallout happened. Dave moved back to New York, I ended up bringing our other roommate home to Manitoba. That didn’t go so well. But I kept up with Dave afterward.

Dave got married just over a year after – in May of 2005, just after I met my wife – to another roleplayer whom he had met over the summer, a wonderful, vivacious woman named Blythe. She was one of the crowd who came up after Dave and I (to be fair, Dave was there before I was) so much of my getting to know her happened after their wedding, which I missed, because I couldn’t get time off work to fly down.

There was some really pure magic with Dave and Blythe. They fit, the way movies tell you you’re supposed to fit. They had passion, they were similar. Breathtaking to listen to; enriching each others lives in every way possible.

They have two sons. Who don’t have a mother now. Blythe passed away on the 30th of December – complications following a surgery. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. And completely ruinous to hear about.

I heard about this through Facebook. By the end of the day, on the 31st, I had a candle lit, had spoken to Dave on the phone, and had spent the better part of half an hour crying with my wife – who had never met Blythe either, but knew her none the less, because of me, and because of Dave. I wasn’t up late last night to mind the passing of the year; I spent three hours in bed, tending a set of candles and holding a private vigil. The first thing I did when I woke up this morning was light the white candle again – which burned straight through brunch and finally let itself our with more than a half hour of smouldering around four this afternoon.

I hadn’t ever met Blythe in person. How much does this matter? We can talk and talk about relationships and ephemera, but there’s a simple truth behind all of this. I – and others who live in the cloud – let into our lives people who we, under other circumstances, would never have been exposed to. Some of us form friendships that last for years, even decades – I’ve known Dave ten years, now. Some of us nearly propose to what people lacking this avenue of connection would call axe murderers or complete strangers.

Some of us get married, have children, and spend long periods of time happy in spite of everything the world can throw at us. Some of us, eventually, find ourselves shedding tears and sitting in speechless agony because, as connected as we can become, very little can change the fact that I can’t fly to New York and help Dave and his sons through this. One of my three or four best friends, in the world, is in the biggest pain he’ll ever experience and I can’t do anything.

But I can do something. I can tell you this story, and hope that you’ll light a candle for Blythe and Dave and their sons. I can hope that you take yourself, and your connections more seriously. If you allow it, foster it, there are so many sources of connection – to so many people so like you you’d barely believe it. If you allow it, some day you’ll light a candle for a friend you can’t be near enough to hug.

There’s pain in this. This connection and distance. Without this connection, Dave wouldn’t have had such a beautiful life for the last five and more years. Without it, I wouldn’t likely be alive, because I wouldn’t have known Dave, and he couldn’t have made the offer that saved me.

Without this connection and distance, I couldn’t tell you how much impact Blythe’s passing is having on me and my family, none of whom ever met her, and only one of whom met Dave.

I love my friends. I do everything I can for them, including trying, as hard as I can to make you notice, because someone should. Everyone should. Everyone needs someone in their lives like Blythe was for Dave.

Think about that for a few minutes. I’m going to go light another candle for the evening.

Update, January 3rd 2010: While I’m aware this is entirely unrelated, it’s reassuring to see that the idea of concerted connection is making itself known about the web. Chris Brogan made a post today about “Emotions at a Distance” that echoes the intention of this one; take the human connection seriously.

Update, April 18th 2010: It’s been a while since I checked in on this, but it’s worth mentioning. David is getting on alright. So am I. Surprisingly, we just spoke about getting some of the creative work from the old gold game up online. I’ll update with that more later. Keep taking your connections seriously.