Editing Our Future

Following the interview I did with Steve Meacham last week, I'm quoted at length in today's Sydney Morning Herald, in an article titled "Editing Our Future" (page 18). Ostensibly this is about the content preservation efforts by the National Library of Australia and the International Internet Preservation Consortium, but in also covering some of the key reasons for why contemporary Internet content must be preserved for posterity t also goes into blogging and various other key forms of content production and publishing on the Web. Steve's done a great job with the article; it's also online here (at least according to Google News - I can't be bothered dealing with the SMH's silly user registration system).

Steve conducted part of his interview with me via email, and I'm posting my responses to his questions here:

(a) Why is it important to preserve websites? And what is the name of the consortium you serve on?

It's the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC, netpreserve.org), involving 11 national libraries and the Internet Archive. They're developing tools and strategies for archiving Internet content. The point of it is that the Internet (and here especially the Web) is an increasingly central publication medium in the world, and therefore just as has been the case with previous 'new' media forms it is becoming important to preserve some of its past and present content for posterity. That's in line with the efforts which have been made in the past (and which continue) for example to preserve books and letters from earlier centuries, or to preserve photos and films from the late 19th/early 20th century.

Of course in archiving the content of such a relatively recent medium it is often not very easy to identify what will be worth archiving (as in, what content will be of interest to future generations). Few would have predicted the rapid rise of the Web as a medium in itself, for example, and much less that of specific Web content forms (e.g. blogging, streaming media, etc.) at the time they first appeared. This may mean that we will have to be fairly inclusive in choosing content that's worth archiving, and let future generations make their own selections of what material from the archive they find worthwhile. (Right now, for example, many people publish their own creative work online - it's impossible to predict who of these will be the next major novelist, poet, filmmaker, visual artist, etc., but I'm certain that when they do become famous many would be interested in the opportunity to see their earliest works in the format and context that they first appeared in.)

(b) How do you compare early websites and early novels?

The novel as a form was much maligned when it first appeared - it was seen by some as an artistically worthless form of cheap entertainment for the masses, and an agent of moral corruption. Of course today we think differently, and many researchers and historians have looked at the development of this genre of writing to chart how we got from there to here. Much the same can be said about many other media forms - how did the standard broadsheet newspaper style develop, or talkback radio, or reality TV. Often these reflect the spirit of their times, and thereby tell us much about what it was like to live in these times. Early Websites are no different in this respect, and here particularly it is also interesting to follow the rapid evolution of technology and the development of the uses people made of it. The Web in particular is a medium that is very open to all participants (compared say with print or broadcast where getting published or broadcast is very rare for the average person) - so on the Web content format and genre evolution truly involved the creativity and interests of a very broad cross-section of society.

(c) Why is the group blog Stand Down so interesting?

It demonstrates some of the ways blogs can be used to facilitate public discussion and deliberation about current and important events - it includes bloggers from the right and the left of U.S. politics who are united in their rejection of the Iraq war, and so it shows that (even) U.S. politics isn't necessarily as polarised as we might sometimes think. And this kind of public discussion is very uncommon in other media - as a writer of letters to the editor, a caller to a talkback show, or a vox pop person on a TV show I'm always subject to the editors' choices in what gets published or broadcast and what doesn't, while here I can have my unedited say.

(d) How and why are marketing companies etc using blogs to reach a new audience?

(You might be interested in this article in BusinessWeek: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/
05_18/b3931001_mz001.htm)

There are two sides to this: corporate blogging enables companies to reach an audience which isn't particularly interested in (and able to be influenced by) traditional advertising. Corporate blogging can be used to release (leak) selected information into the blogosphere to start generating some interest in an upcoming product, and that information - if found to be interesting by the bloggers - then takes on a life of its own and circulates through the blogosphere without the need for formal advertising campaigns. Essentially, it's viral marketing, and that's a form of advertising that is now increasingly being recognised as a very important tool by marketers (seeing as especially the more savvy audiences now tend to be very jaded by traditional ads). On the other hand, corporate blogging can also help respond and defuse public criticism of a company's products - it can help give insight into why a particular feature isn't available in a product, or why certain pricing structures are in place, or simply deal with unfounded rumours or complaints in an effective way. Again, such corporate blog entries get circulated in the blogosphere and possibly are distributed further than a mere statement on a company Website.

(e) What was the example of the US senator who had to resign when bloggers picked up comments the mainstream media had missed.

That was Trent Lott. There's a reasonably write-up about it in Wired (http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,56978,00.html), and I'm sure there are a number of other articles covering the whole affair...

(f) What was the Howard Dean experience?

Well, Dean managed to be very successful in using blogs to create a public following for his Primary campaign, even though he wasn't initially a particularly fancied candidate. He used blogs to publish information about his political programme, to alert locals to where he'd make his next campaign stops, and to raise funds for the campaign. As far as I know he was supported far more than the other contenders by smallish donations from everyday people, not by major contributions from corporations like most of the other candidates, and the ability to donate directly online was mostly responsible for that. To a certain extent his campaign was also more about his ideas (as expressed on the blogs) than about whatever soundbites he'd generate in his speeches (as seen on TV), because of the important role blogs played in the campaign. That was a double-edged sword, though: he didn't control the content published in supporter blogs (in contrast to the few 'official' pseudo-blogs - in other words, press releases masquerading as blog entries - used later by the Kerry and Bush campaigns, for example), so to some extent he lost control of the message and was said to have made statements that he never did, and was misreported. Also, despite the increasing role of the Net, TV remains the most important medium in the U.S. at present, and his public persona on TV didn't match his public persona online. This is very similar to what happened in the Nixon/Kennedy election in 1960 (1961 ?) where Nixon came across better on the radio, but looked awful on TV, and ultimately lost the election.

(g) How do modern blogs differ from early personal home pages...

Modern Website technology (sites using dynamic scripting languages and running off databases) is much more flexible and user-friendly than earlier setups (where sites were written in static HTML and had to be manually downloaded, edited, and re-uploaded to make changes). This means that once a site is installed it is now very easy for end-users to post or edit articles, add comments, create links, etc. This is a continuing trend; we're nowhere near the end of it yet. So, far more people can post content online - you don't need to know HTML or be able to set up or run a server at all in order to start up a blog, for example. Instead of having a traditional homepage with some personal information or views which got updated every few months or so it is now possible even for entirely technologically unskilled people to post multiple blog entries each day if they so choose. So, it's now much more about what people have to say than whether they have the skills to master the technology they use to say it. In addition to this, advanced blog technology also enables other sites to become very sophisticated at analysing what people say on their blogs - so instead of Yahoo! or Google simply indexing page after page and thereby making them searchable, you get Daypop.com or Technorati.com which index blog post by blog post, and thereby discover what are the major themes and topics bloggers write about at this very hour. That's a fascinating insight into the events of the day - literally of the day.