5 ms·

You and I don't disagree in the least. I never claimed as a publisher that I didn't want to write to a specific audience, just that I didn't want to write to a

by ggrot 17y ago

You and I don't disagree in the least. I never claimed as a publisher that I didn't want to write to a specific audience, just that I didn't want to write to a specific platform. The audience I want to reach doesn't hang out on just one reading platform unfortunately. You use one single web browser when you use twitter, facebook, blogging, email, buzz, and HN, don't you? You are standardizing on HTTP and HTML, but you already knew that. I am certainly not suggesting only ever using one platform to publish. In fact I specifically mentioned 3 as a strawman that I might use (flickr+twitter+blogger). They serve different writing styles, but are not necessarily different audiences. My wife might be interested in following all 3, you might only be interested in my blog. That makes sense. In the analogy to the internet, there are a million ways to run a website: apache, frontpage, nginx, blogger, geocities, angelfire. Yet, these websites all work in the same way at some level. I can read them all in one browser (*mostly), I can link between them, I can crawl and index them, and they all participate in the same DNS system making it easy to find them. PS: The need to choose a title for a blog post isn't really relevant - there is nothing about blogging that requires content to have specific titles. Some specific blogging packages do of course.

mechanical_fish 17y ago
You are standardizing on HTTP and HTML Indeed. That's an excellent point. If HTTP and HTML didn't exist, we would be compelled to invent them... as we were fifteen years ago when we did invent them. However, HTTP and HTML do exist. And all these other tools are already built on that common platform. So exactly what are we trying to further standardize? What remaining problem are we trying to solve? Because the remaining technical barriers to publishing the same text on (e.g.) Twitter, Flickr, and Blogger are very few: A bit of login hassle (ameliorated by persistent cookies), a bit of copying and pasting. You can automate even more of these keypresses away [1], but I suspect that such efforts are approaching the point of diminishing returns. Because the ultimate bottleneck to publishing the same content on multiple platforms isn't really the time required to paste it. It's the time required to recraft the content to fit each different medium, and the (far longer) time which you must spend living in each medium's community before you learn the difference between what is locally appropriate and what is painfully tone-deaf. --- [1] See, e.g., http://www.janrain.com/ http://www.janrain.com/.
_delirium 17y ago
I suppose I do want to write and read specific platforms, and it annoys me when people have stuff auto-propagate in ways that, as the grandparent mentions, are tone-deaf to the platform, like tweets auto-pushed as Facebook status updates, while totally failing to respect the conventions of Facebook status updates as a medium of discourse (you don't use #hashtags on Facebook, for example, and it's common to exceed 140 chars). Constraint matters, and different constraints produce different forms of media. (I'm a big fan of McLuhan on this.)

by ggrot 17y ago

mechanical_fish 17y ago

You are standardizing on HTTP and HTML Indeed. That's an excellent point. If HTTP and HTML didn't exist, we would be compelled to invent them... as we were fifteen years ago when we did invent them. However, HTTP and HTML do exist. And all these other tools are already built on that common platform. So exactly what are we trying to further standardize? What remaining problem are we trying to solve? Because the remaining technical barriers to publishing the same text on (e.g.) Twitter, Flickr, and Blogger are very few: A bit of login hassle (ameliorated by persistent cookies), a bit of copying and pasting. You can automate even more of these keypresses away [1], but I suspect that such efforts are approaching the point of diminishing returns. Because the ultimate bottleneck to publishing the same content on multiple platforms isn't really the time required to paste it. It's the time required to recraft the content to fit each different medium, and the (far longer) time which you must spend living in each medium's community before you learn the difference between what is locally appropriate and what is painfully tone-deaf. --- [1] See, e.g., http://www.janrain.com/ http://www.janrain.com/.

_delirium 17y ago

I suppose I do want to write and read specific platforms, and it annoys me when people have stuff auto-propagate in ways that, as the grandparent mentions, are tone-deaf to the platform, like tweets auto-pushed as Facebook status updates, while totally failing to respect the conventions of Facebook status updates as a medium of discourse (you don't use #hashtags on Facebook, for example, and it's common to exceed 140 chars). Constraint matters, and different constraints produce different forms of media. (I'm a big fan of McLuhan on this.)