Jonathon Delacour the heart of things

The long and short of it

Michael Webb requested “the option to publish just the title (along with any attribution, etc) but not the content (item description) to rss:”

The title would be the link to the archive page. the item description could be the main text area for the item, and source either weblog homepage or imported source. The relevant trick I would like is to be able to not publish the item description in the rss. That is to say, I want to publish headlines(titles) in rss, and the title and description (content, enclosures) to a home page. An option checkbox could include the content in the rss for those who prefer.

In his subsequent post, Michael asked: “Is this a response to my previous post? A few hours of difference in post time suggests it may be.”

The “this” Michael referred to was a post by Dave Winer:

How people read on the web. They want to get to the beef asap. Most people will only skim, and record the fact that the article is there, and then use Google to find it when and if they need it. So the most important thing is to quickly say what you’re going to do in the piece and who should care. Quickness is a very important thing. Most people just dash in and out. At least this is my assumption. That’s one of the reasons I give quick soundbites, and the sources.

I’ve been reading Scripting News for years so I can understand why Doc Searls would say—with no sense of “pissing in Dave’s pocket”—that Dave Winer is the person he admires most in the new media industry.

I admire Dave too, but his response to Michael’s post—if it was a response—left much to be desired. That’s a polite way of saying I think Dave is dead wrong. (Let me make it perfectly clear that Michael and I may be hallucinating that Dave responded.)

One of the standard techniques of conflict resolution is to ask Party B to carefully and respectfully repeat what Party A said. Party A is then given an opportunity to explain or clarify what they believed they’d actually said. And so the dialogue proceeds. My comments from this point on are offered in that spirit.

This is what I hear Dave saying (if we agree, for the sake of argument, that he did say something):

• A weblog consists of brief pointers to other articles on the web.
• Readers of that weblog, if their interest is aroused and they trust the weblog’s author, will note the article, relying on Google to find it later.
• A useful weblog entry briefly states why the other article deserves attention.
• Speed is of the essence.
• Long weblog entries waste the reader’s time since the real value is contained in the quoted article.

This is what I interpret as Dave’s underlying meaning (the subtext, if you will):

• Weblog readers are hard-pressed for time or they have short attention spans; therefore the weblogging tradition is based on short posts that point to an item of interest on another website.
• Brevity is of the essence in a weblog entry, although it is important to state why the quoted article is worth reading.
• The RSS mechanism assumes that webloggers will understand and follow the tradition.
• If webloggers blogged properly (i.e. they followed the rules), there wouldn’t be a problem with RSS feeds.

It’s not that Dave doesn’t write extended posts—rather, he has a separate website, DaveNet, that he uses for such entries, which he classifies as essays. But he certainly seems unsympathetic to long weblog posts. Since one of Dave’s stated aims is to turn the Web into a writing environment (and, as far as I’m aware, he hasn’t qualified that statement), I can’t help but point to a degree of inconsistency. Unless Dave is saying: “I want the Web to be a writing environment, as long as all you bloggers—as distinct from essayists—keep it short and sweet.”

I don’t want to keep it short and sweet. I did when I started blogging but not anymore. Nor do I always wish to point to other articles. The feedback I receive suggests that I write sufficiently well to hold a reader’s attention for three to five screenfuls, even if the topic is somewhat esoteric. My weblog may not attract a mass audience, but that’s OK. I don’t regard myself as a mainstream writer.

If you’ve got this far, you’ll realize that I’m a long-form blogger, as opposed to the short-form blogger that Dave appears to favor (unless the long posts are saved as stories—for example, Dave’s own essays or David Berry’s excellent Using FrontPage with Radio Tutorials).

I didn’t start out as a long-form blogger, so how did I end up that way? I followed the only useful piece of advice I ever read about writing—apart from “Write Every Day”—which was that one should attempt to emulate the writing one loves to read. Analyzing my blogroll, I find that two-thirds are long-form blogs, by which I mean that they violate Dave’s ideal of the short weblog entry. Yet despite the rigorous demands of the long-form, they all write beautiful prose that engages my attention—day after day. As Burningbird said: “Weblogging is the world’s greatest novel, written by me and about 10,000 of my closest friends.”

I’ve considered introducing a procedure for my weblog whereby I include long entries as normal posts and then, after a week or so, reassign them as stories, leaving only the first paragraph as the blog entry. But then I think to myself: “All my blogging pals are happy to publish long posts, why should I be the odd blogger out?” Admittedly though, my (frequently) long posts don’t lend themselves to RSS syndication—they simply clog up the RSS feed. As Michael explains:

Radio excells at passing tidbits, links and short bits around, but one long post in an rss feed clogs up the subscribers news aggregator page, and discourages any sharing of longer content, or indeed any rss content from sites that publish items more than a couple sentences long.

The news model, passing around a headline/link, with the content residing on a static site is efficient. For example, if I wanted to use my news aggregator to publish to a headline box on a site, subscribing to Jonathan just isn’t going to work, even on the desktop news page it is awkward.

The answer seems simple: offer the option to publish the title but not the content to RSS. Michael points to a side benefit: “It would give the art of writing headlines a whole new life.”

I’m not optimistic though. It’s not just that long-form blogging is ill-suited to RSS feeds, it also goes against the spirit of the new XML feeds ranking system, in which as Adam Curry points out, “If you don’t update, you start to feel blog-gravity.” Make that “if you don’t update frequently”—or—”if you don’t conform to the short-form blogging rule.”

Garth describes the new order:

According to the emailed feedback from yesterday, I have at least four feed-readers—thanks for the mail, everyone!
Now, if they’re all on one feed, I should be able to get on Dave’s feed chart by posting six times in consecutive hours. I’m not sure I can be bothered, though. :)

Welcome to the weblogging sweatshop: Blogging in the Dark Satanic Mills.

Permalink