A discussion across blogs with more authority than mine addresses continued interest in blogging. Jeffery Zeldman questioned his “blahg” and his audience’s interest in their own blogs, which resulted in a flurry of responses ranging between passionate and disenchanted. Greg Storey’s suggestion of the loss of craft was highlighted by Matt Linderman’s Signal vs. Noise mention, leading the discussion towards the visual homogeneity RSS feed aggregation encourages.

With the multitude of reasons people publish online it’s inconsiderate to generalize, but in reading through comments a single response kept coming to me:

Stop whining!

The web will always evolve, this should be obvious to anyone playing along. The barrier to entry is low enough so anyone can publish somewhere with minimal effort; my drivel is as easy to post as the next guy’s. If you need to feel you’re still contributing for it to be worth your effort, say something relevant or new, and you’ll hold an audience. Or you’ll at least get it off your chest.

You compete with ad-based sites populated by human or machine with the sole purpose of baiting potential traffic and turning it into advertising revenue, but that doesn’t prevent you from posting, and the Internet has ways of making those ad-focused sites less relevant. Search, be it Google, Technorati, or The Next Thing, is only an effective business model when accurate. The market will in-fact find you, even if it takes some adjusting on its part first.

Oh, I’m sorry, this was about art for you? A post composer in a content tool’s textarea or the repetitive post/comment layout not providing the freedom you need? Be creative and get your hands dirty with your publishing tools, or abandon them altogether — once upon a time we all wrote our own HTML, many of us just got tired of it. If it’s about the creation, there’s nothing stopping you from starting from scratch.

Or is it that RSS allows the ungrateful masses to get away with not even looking at your styled site? Skipping your ad impressions? Their pesky feed aggregators consuming your carefully designed site in plain text? Get over it. If it is that important to you the only way someone can consume your work is visually through the browser, go ahead only share an update notice in your feed, or remove it entirely, but do so at your own risk. With increasing client and web-based aggregators, and even RSS support in the browsers themselves, it’s only getting easier to consume the web by feeds alone. Is what you have to show interesting enough for people to make an exception?

If it just turns out you’re bored with blogging and don’t want to play anymore, fine. Don’t post anything. You don’t owe anyone anything. Someone else will happily take your traffic.

[this frustration-motivated post offers nothing that hasn’t been re-hashed elsewhere]

Hans shares some details of his PersonCode idea, along with a scenario tying profile details between sites for mashup potential.

Issues I have with the landscape right now:

1. A consistent and private identifier has still not been adopted.

   Hans calls out MicroID as the closest conceptually, though it doesn’t appear to extend much past validating ownership of content. The suggestion that MicroID may be repurposed to also allow generating a unique ID for every URI one would want to claim further leads me to think it’s not ideal for specific identity concerns.

2. Users are lazy.

   Adoption will only succeed if the identifier is implemented to limit additional input a user must contribute or remember, otherwise you’ll only keep the geeks closer to the technology that recognize the benefits and rationalize the extra steps. I’m able to throw a MicroID or Personcode meta tag in my site header to identify me. I would save a PersonCode in a web app’s profile setting page if it meant access to additional information. But these are also one-time actions. Add a PersonCode input to the Add Comment forms we use? Maybe… Certainly I’d like to assert myself as the author every time I post something on somenone else’s site, but I already often include Name and URL at least, email perhaps, but those are easy to remember. b1696048949625089c03b9a585e93247a3ef72d0 not so much. Maybe the app generates it for me from the existing credentials, or browser-autocomplete makes this a moot point.

3. I prefer the decentralized approach, but that means more work to get it going.

   Bit of a “chicken or the egg” issue here. A user won’t create a PersonCode until they see the benefit from a web of sites that support it, and how many sites will implement communication between each other until there’s a user-base for it? A central source of discovery for types of information would ease the implementation-side, but that model doesn’t regularly survive. Each site would have to adequately describe how they share the information for others to consume. Get a few high-profiles to adopt it though, and I can see it taking off quickly.

Other mashup scenarios?

• plazes could use my PersonCode to request my photos from flickr that were geo-tagged near where I’m located.
• Update FOAF (or replace?) with a PersonCode friend list I host, allow that as the source of my friends, and let sites use that as the basis of my network for sharing photos, links, events, etc.

I want to see this succeed, regardless of format, but incentives have to be made obvious to get people on board.

I switched my DNS records tonight to allow Google for domains to take over email for nopaper.net. We’ll see if the propagation completes in time for the morning spam (tastes better than coffee). If I’m lucky, I’ll have Google snooping managing my email when I wake up, and the data lost to the void between mail servers will be minimal.

SMTP and POP authentication tests from Mail.app have already turned out successful, so I’m encouraged.

(If you’re interested, you have to request your own invite. Hard to beat free.)

Update:

It looks like all is well. I was worried for a moment as I didn’t get the spam I was expecting, but of course Google’s filtering is taking care of that; I’ll happily let them deal with it.

Now if I can just figure out how to use my email address for the Jabber/XMPP protocol authentication through the Google Talk network, that would be pretty slick.