history 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?

The Power of Immediate Collaboration

February 12, 2011 by Ian 2 Comments

One of the things I love about the web is it’s asynchronicity.

I can send you an email, or address a tweet your way on Monday morning and, unless it’s something urgent, you can respond as late as you like – right through to happy hour the following Friday. Based entirely on our needs, we can schedule our interactions loosely, and have conversations over the course of days, weeks, or even months without losing the thread of things, because there is almost always a meta-data supplied history for everything we do.

We can even consume media asynchronously. Through Google Reader or Instapaper, I can gather up weeks of stories from my favorite blogs,

Another thing I love about the web is it’s immediacy.

If I need to listen real-time for something, I can set up a net of Google Alerts and have them delivered by RSS into my feed reader of choice. I can get the information I’m looking for on an as-indexed basis. I could also use other listening tools, if I needed to, to expand my ears and make myself into a super-hero quality observer. I’d never miss a thing.

I stopped actively checking my mail years ago – there’s an app for that. I also stopped worrying over content management and coding the text of each page on my site a long time ago – there’s a plethora of apps for that

Need a quick response? Find me on Twitter.

Want to host a distributed chat event? Again, see Twitter – this time just make a hashtag and let people come to you.

Need to edit a document at the same time as I do? Let’s share a Google Doc and work on it at the same time.

When it comes time to publish my book, I’ll barely need a publisher at all.

I also stopped relying on online chats and tools like IRC a while ago. Through tools available now on the web, I’ve almost entirely eliminated the need for destination-based communication in my work.

Recently, I also moved much of my collaborative writing into Google Docs specifically, and have completely abandoned the last remaining web chat I’ve been using for the last ten years. No more need of it. Sure, I’m losing some serendipity – the possibility that a new player might randomly stumble into a game I’m running – but I’m gaining curatorial control, synchronism, and the benefit of a closed platform for speed and focus. And when the aim is to pump out large volumes of high-quality writing in short periods of time, that’s a huge benefit.

How amazing is this: In less than three hours on a Google Doc, my writing cohort and I managed to churn out 3000 words of content between us. Single paragraphs, in cyclical production, with a fully functional back-channel right in the window with us, and the option of Skype if we wanted to really dive into the meta side of the work.

Two days’ worth of NaNoWriMo-class writing in just a few hours. Neither of us were tired, neither of us concerned with running out of data or inspiration. We only got through about a chapter and a half, after all, of plot. If we manage to keep working the plot hard enough for a few weeks, we may have a mini-novel to do something with. No planning, no strategy. Just the work, instant and simple reference, built-in editing, and some otherwise idle time.

Imagine what people working with intention might do?

Two people working on a book could churn out a manuscript (conceivably) in just a few weeks, working full-time. That’s with time to do research, collaborate on structure, set up a framework, and get all the facts checked at the same time.

However you need to work with someone remotely – whether in the same room or across the world – the web provides.

And the means are always improving, for everyone using them. Not just because of the advances in the tools themselves, but also because of the way people use them for increasingly ingenious things.

What do you do on the web with others that totally blows your mind?

Frozen Feeds – A Story About Blog Privacy and How it Applies to Facebook

May 14, 2010 by Ian 4 Comments

When I started blogging in 1998, it was on free services designed for just that thing. I walled my garden, created a “locked” blog, which only my friends could read.

Then, sometime around 1999, more of my friends complained that they wanted to read what I was writing. So I opened up my privacy settings. I got some weird reactions to posts I’d created years earlier, but that was par for the course – you’ve opened up an aspect of your life that was created without the expectation of openness about.

So what happened? My tone changed. That’s what happens. And everyone else? Some of my friends followed suit, and a lot of them stopped posting entirely. We called those frozen feeds – like podfading and other adoption-then-abandonment patterns, it was inevitably the people who hadn’t really bought in who lost out.

Flash forward. Facebook. Privacy issues galore. Part of the issue here is not the action, it’s the archive – just like it was with suddenly unlocked blogs, the expectation of future publicness doesn’t address the fear over past privacy.

Building a new expectation of publicness is not the issue. No one cares about privacy, they just hate being surprised. Services will give, or not give, the option for publicness or privacy as suits their business interests. How can we expect anything different?

This doesn’t apply just to Facebook and Google, or other services. This is about creating expectations, not only about new changes, but also about how your business intends to treat your previous, and future trust.

I don’t care, at the end of the day, if privacy settings are removed from social networks. Don’t like it? Don’t hit publish. But there does need to be a respect for the decisions people have made before the expectation of publicness was ever put forward. If we could only, in all of this privacy kerfuffle, just press a button that said “make everything from this date forward public, and leave everything in my history under the old settings.

And no one has said, in all of these arguments, word one about an “Archive as Private” option.

That’s disappointing.

What Pay Walls have in common with Maginot's Line

December 16, 2009 by Ian 4 Comments

After the Great War, France erected a line of defence on its border with Italy and Germany, hoping that it would provide a funnel for attackers wishing to avoid the line itself, or that invaders would simply get made into hamburger by the many many guns. Unfortunately, like many reactionary measures, it was built to deal with the tactics of yesterday, and then advanced around by the thinkers of the time.

Instead of traipsing up to the line and getting cut down, the Germans who invaded in 1940 got smart. They set out decoys, picked a target carefully, even sent the Luftwaffe straight over the line (which was not intended to defend against aerial targets so much less common in the previous war). Within five days of their approach to the line, Germany was in France. Maginot’s Line failed. But not the way most people believe it did.

The common misconception is that the Germans just went around by going through Belgium. It’s a limited myth; the actual attack was surgical and presented a scenario the wall was not meant to deal with.

I hope you can see where I’m going with this.

Not just speaking of news, there’s been a big kerfuffle for the last little while about monetizing services on the internet. Subscription-only news sites, limiting traffic from non-direct sources, any number of tactics in defence of digital turf – all of this becomes inherently futile once people figure out, in critical mass, how to avoid he need for access to the turf itself. The erecting of these walls – even the really small, annoying ones lime between-page ads – is a tactic that assumes those coming your way have no other savvy, that they’ll hit the wall and behave exactly as you want them to. The trouble is, we content invaders have already found our Luftwaffe, and it’s flying over your head right now.

Jeff Jarvis talks a lot about hyperlocal news. To an extent I agree with him. The idea that anyone, anywhere near an event can riff on it and get the word out to a place where it’s ready and waiting for an audience is a big deal. It won’t always be blogging or twitter, something else will eventually evolve in addition to the tools we have now, but the behaviour is already there.

You – as a content producer – are no longer defined by what you’re trained in, or what you’ve exposed yourself to in the past. Now, you can easily redefine your knowledge and gain new perspective with nothing more than thirty seconds and an internet connection. Like the scene from The Matrix, when Trinity needed training to fly a helicopter, and all she did was hit up the operator, hold her phone to her ear for a few seconds and download. Ok, so that’s an extreme example, but the analogue is there, isn’t it? I haven’t failed to answer a question in probably a year and a half since I got my first BlackBerry, mostly because I was already search-savvy, and suddenly had fairly universal access to snackable information.

Using monetization schemes as a barrier (even if the barrier is click-it-away like with interstitial ads) is a failing prospect from the get go, for the same reason as the Maginot Line was broken. Tactics never remain the same; that’s why they’re tactics and not practices.