Author: Kevin Lawver

I suggested this on the NetNewsWire bug report list, but it really doesn’t belong there. I was poking around the RSS 2.0 spec today and saw a weird little optional tag with <item> called <enclosure>. Enclosure takes length, type and url as arguments, and says it’s for “media” files. But, like the script tag, you can pass it any MIME type and url. Here’s where the lightening struck. Why not pass in a stylesheet? Just like you use <link> to pull in your external stylesheet, why not have an RSS feed stylesheet. Why? One of the big complaints about RSS Readers is that the post is displayed outside its intended context – the designed page it originated on. If we were able to pass in a stylesheet, we could style the properties of the objects in a post to make it look more like the original page. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Now, Brent doesn’t think enclosure’s the right place to put it, but I really didn’t see anything else in 2.0, or in the infant Echo specs about style information. I think giving designers some control over how their content is display in an aggregator would go a long way to driving acceptance of using syndication as a method of distribution of content, and not just the notification tool a lot of sites offer today.

Why do it? Why tell the world about a new product your company is launching? It’s a perfectly reasonable question I’ve been asking myself since Thursday night. Over 450 people came by just yesterday (on top of the almost two hundred on Friday, and over a hundred on Thursday in the three hours between 9 and midnight. Today, it’s 2:30, and it’s close to 300).

So, why do it? What’s in it for me? Other than the awe of watching the traffic and trackbacks roll in, not much. Maybe some more people start coming to my humble little blog, or subscribe to my RSS feeds. And maybe after this blows over I drop back down to my perfectly comfortable and managable 70 – 80 unique visitors a day (as measured by SiteMeter), maybe lower. Does it really matter? Nope, not really. I’ll still be here posting my nonsensical prose and photos. I’ll still be here thinking the same thoughts I thought before.

You know why I think I did it? I never get to talk about work here. I work on a lot of stuff that’s confidential, yet I think is interesting, and I would love to talk about. For example, I worked on several big deals at AOL from a technical perspective. Of course, I couldn’t tell anyone about them, and only accidentally let one of them slip to my wife (that was a funny moment – “Dear, I didn’t say that, really.” “You didn’t say what?” “Oh, nevermind, just don’t say ‘google’ to anyone you know.”). Most people I talk to outside of my little group at work have no idea what it means to build search products, or the complexities that happen behind the scenes that bring you your results. So, I never talk about it. I definitely can’t talk about it here. You see, I like my job and would like to keep it.

Having the chance to meet the folks in New York, and then the double bonus of being able to share that experience here – it was something I couldn’t pass up. Although I didn’t write a line of code for the Journals product, I sat in a lot of meetings early on explaining blogging, trying to communicate that the post is the unit of measurement in the blogging world, and then trying to help figure out the best way to search posts – how do you weight things? What’s more important, the title or body? Should we weight by recency? It was the most fun I’ve had in a work meeting. I got to expound on two things I love – blogging and search (yeah, I’m weird, freely admitted, thanks). Now that I’ve played with the product, after being out of the loop while I got back to urgent search things, I see that people actually listened to me and now some of those things I suggested will be out there for AOL members to use and you all to see.

I’m a little worried about the ethics of promoting a company product in my personal space. It’s not that I don’t think the product is good. I do. It’s not that I feel cheap or used in doing it. Honestly, it was my idea. There’s something gnawing in the back of my head. Now that I’ve done it once, how do I go back to what I did before? I know none of you care about this, but this is the first time I’ve done this, and wrestling with it in my own puny human brain is giving me a headache, on top of this rash of hayfever. You know, these judgements would be really easy if I was self-employed. I could talk about whatever I wanted and only ever have to answer to myself. These “to post or not to post” self-conversations are no fun.

So, there you go, hopefully that explains it somewhat (more for me than for you, but hey, you’ve already read this far…). Don’t expect this to turn into As the Triangle Turns. Unless I go to any more demos, I probably won’t mention AOL Journals again, and then, I’ll probably just talk about the people I met, since I’ve already talked about the product. Oh, and it’s really weird to see my crap quoted on other blogs. Weirds me out, let me tell you.

I went to New York City today. I’m back home now, almost twelve hours after I left. It’s been a long day. As long as it’s been, it’s been a lot of fun. The top secret meeting is now something I can talk about. I went to New York with the AOL Journals team to talk about the new AOL Journals product with some influential folks in the blogging world. Who? Well, I’ll tell you: Meg Hourihan, Anil Dash, Nick Denton, Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky. I was amazed that Gait invited me to come along with them. I didn’t work on the Journals product. I helped with a lot of the concept stuff, explaining to people who have never blogged or really knew about blogging, what it was all about and providing a “real blogger’s” perpective on the whole thing. I hope I didn’t lead them astray.

Let’s start at the beginning though… I woke up too early, at 5:30 for an 8:45 flight. I got to the airport at 7, expecting a long wait at security. There were three people in the line when I got there. I pulled into the parking garage at Dulles airport at 6:50 and was at my gate at 7:05. I had a lot of time to kill, as you’ll see in the pictures. Gait, Andrea and El Jefe made it to the airport with much less time to spare. Oh yeah, characters. I worked with Gait a long (four years) time ago on the first version of AOL Search. Andrea the product manager for the Journals thing, and El Jefe is Gait and Andrea’s boss (but he’s not the boss o’ me!!). We made it to New York, with an hour till the meeting. We made it into the building with about ten minutes before the demo was supposed to start. I gallantly got my laptop setup, hooked up to the TV, connected to the VPN, logged in and ready to go, and… we were in the wrong building. Yeah, all the people with stacks of books and puzzled looks on their faces should have clued us in, but… hey, we were in a hurry. So, a run across the street and around the block and we made it only a couple minutes late. I, in record time, got the demo back up and running and we were off.

The meeting… it was way too much fun. Why are influential bloggers influential? They have ideas, and aren’t shy about expressing them. They had all kinds of suggestions, all kinds of comments, and overall, I think the consensus is that AOL Journals is headed in the right direction. Now, let me explain something. AOL Journals is different. No one thinks of blogging as a new “space” to conquer. Most of the people involved in the project realize that AOL’s coming into an established meta-community who are wary of any large corporate involvement in their space. I think we did a good job of explaining to the folks there, and explaining to people at AOL, that we’re here with a great measure of humility (I know, it’s rare for AOL, but it’s true). We’re trying to play nice with the larger blogging community by supporting open standards like RSS feeds for blogs. We’re trying to talk to folks in the community to see where we should work with them. It’s unique in my involvement in AOL products, which is a great step in the right direction as far as I’m concerned.

When the product does come out later this year, bear in mind that it’s a 1.0, there are other new features on the way, and it’s built for the AOL user in mind. That said, I’m not one who shies away from speaking my mind. There are some really cool features in the product at launch. RSS support will be in 1.0, along with a bunch of other stuff that I’m not going to tell you about. Ok, I’ll tell you one… you can send an IM to a bot and have it post to your blog with rich text support and other cool stuff (like add titles, etc). That really blew a couple people away, even though I know bloggerbot kind of did the same thing in a limited (as I remember, flakey). How cool is that?

It was a great trip. I hope Jefe, Andrea and Gait take me along on their next trip (I vote for Sedona, or Alaska. I’m sure there are influential Alaskan bloggers, aren’t there?).

A couple weeks till the big three year anniversary for this site. My first post (the link to the Max pics doesn’t even work!) with Blogger was on 7/20/2000. In July of 2002, I switched to Movable Type, and never looked back.\
Why have I kept going? Blogging is fun. It’s a good clean and fairly cheap hobby outside of the \$50 I gave to Ben and Mena for Movable Type and my cheap hosting. I’ve reconnected with old friends, found too many new ones to list here, and found a great place to hone my webby skills. Without a blog, I don’t think I’d have gotten into CSS as much as I have, and never would have bought Zeldman’s book.\
Blogging has helped improve my writing skills. I’m still not a good writer, but I’m better than I was. It’s helped my design skills (not that you can really tell from here, this design is getting a little stale, just wait till Michelle’s redesign launches, and then Marty’s – then I’ll redo this one and show you what I’ve learned recently).\
Blogging has introduced me to lives I never would have known about before. It gives me a window into peoples’ circumstances I don’t think you can get through any other medium on this scale. A good documentary can introduce you to a person, or a small group. Blogging and getting connected to the larger community can connect you to hundreds of peoples’ lives and experiences. As more people start blogging, more of those experiences will be documented, giving a more complete history of their lives, and us as a whole (whether that whole is a community, country, race, or humanity).\
I may tire of blogging myself at some point, but I doubt it. I do expect this site, my writing and me to evolve over time. That’s the whole point. My blog is my expression of myself online (I’d give credit to whoever I got that from, but I don’t remember, if you said it first, send me an url, you’ll get the credit you deserve). I’m constantly changing, which means what I write and how I express myself will change. I’m thinking of some big changes for the redesign (you know, after Michelle and Marty’s are done).\
If you don’t blog now, think about it. There are tools out there, or coming soon (wink, wink), that will make it easier, richer and more fun than it is now for people who aren’t uber-geeks. I hope to last another thirty years, and have this great archive of my life, from the trivial to the truly important, it will be a record of who I was almost every day of my existance from 7/20/2000 until the day I leave this world. I can’t think of a better way to do it.