Writing club demise

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Not so long ago I was enthusing about a local writing club. I had been involved in this group for a year and was looking forward to the new year (it’s meetings ran from October to July).  Alas, a cloud has formed over that group and I find myself at loose ends.

Perhaps I should have seen that cloud on the horizon. Information about the Writers’ Collective disappeared from the KPL website. My email queries to the person from KPL who had faithfully organised the collective for some years went unanswered. And then for two months in a row I received no writing submissions from the other members of my group thereby obviating the point of any meeting.

Maybe it’s me. Last year the group to which I had been assigned seemed vibrant for about 4 months and then folded. I shifted over to another group within the collective for the remainder of the year. Now it too seems to have folded. I know that the two originating groups have persisted despite difficulties with communications (they have been sharing their work directly rather than going through the KPL intermediary). Since I have met some of the members of those groups, I could ask them if I could join in. But I think I would feel a bit like a distant relative who is taken in out of some misplaced familial obligation. (That’s only how I would feel, not how I expect I would be treated.)

It turns out that writing is indeed a solitary activity. To which the corollary can now be added that writing clubs, at least in my experience, tend towards solitariness. Which, I suppose, must contribute to more writing. Or at least I shall take that as my lesson and move on.

Content still matters

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Content is still king. I’m thinking here, initially, about blog posts but I also want to extend this thought to other forms of communication.

An old hobby-horse of mine is the empty, redirecting blog post: I can’t stand them. Almost nothing irritates me more than a blog post that is merely a “pointer” to some other content on the Internet. Worse still is the post that is a pointer to a blog post which itself is merely a pointer to some further content. And so on.

I am stressing merely there (and here) because I think there is a useful place for secondary and even tertiary communications. A post that merely points to some other post is little more than a contextless citation. A post that, in the course of making some point or other, provides a link to some supporting documentation or content about which it is commenting employs secondary communication.   There are even some sensible posts that are really tertiary communications surveying, often, a set of secondary communications. I can see the point of such posts or even such web pages though, yes, they tend to come from librarians.

But I would maintain that content, i.e. primary communication, is still king. Ultimately no matter how much fluttering you have (or need), communication is still about communicating content. And what is content? It might be an opinion (ideally backed up with reasons, but we can only hope). It might be substantive research. It might be reasoned argument, an amusing anecdote, a description, or a story.

I can illustrate this with the posts from this very blog. Looking at the stats that are available on the blogger dashboard I can see that some posts attract a considerably larger number of views over time than others. (And no, this series on communications is not one of my big hitters.) By orders of magnitude.

Which brings me to Twitter. I was wondering whether or not my observations would hold true in the land of 140 characters. And it seems that even there content rules. If you look at the tweets of those with massive numbers of followers, you will find that only the tiniest percentage of those tweets are pointers to some other content and almost none of them are contextless citations or mere pointers. Even on Twitter, primary communication is still valued.

This might be a good opportunity to raise a related point.

Twitter tweets, and FaceBook (FB) status updates did (although I don’t think they do anymore), constrain the tweeter to a limited number of characters. Since some URLs are long, possibly very long, there is a clear need for some way to provide shortened URLs for the links one wishes to share. Fortunately there are very useful services that provide just that: http://bit.ly/ and http://tinyurl.com/ . Using these services you can transform a lengthy URL into something manageable. Great. The downside, of course, is that the now minuscule URL gives no clue as to the site it will take me to if I should click on it. Maybe that isn’t a problem for most people, but I like to know where I’m going (as far as that is reasonably possible) on the Internet. Combine an obscured URL with an already constrained communications window of 140 characters and you have a near-recipe for the contextless citation.

It appears I’ve finally found something I dislike even more than a blog post that merely points me somewhere else. It’s a tweet that points me somewhere else and doesn’t give me any real clue as to where it is pointing me. Now there is a metaphor for something or other!

Cave imitator. Let the follower beware.

Gathering resources

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So far in this series I have been concentrating on websites and blogs over which I have direct control. It turns out, however, that the Internet, almost inevitably, contains a wide array of sites where you are mentioned or where material you may have written or contributed to appears but over which you have no direct control. Test it yourself by Googling your name, and be sure to use double quotes ” ” around it for a more useful set of results. (C’mon, you’ve done this before, you know you have!)

When I did this recently I found out two interesting things: first, there is still a fair bit of dross out there where my name appears but which has absolutely nothing to do with me; second, I re-discovered a number of presentations and articles I had written that I had forgotten about or lost track of. I immediately began to wonder whether it would be useful to draw the latter together in some way in order to make it easy for someone (e.g. a prospective employer, conference organiser, journalist) to get a quick overview of my output in a particular field over the years. A portfolio, if you will, but in particular a portfolio of items which I do not myself have the power either to remove or change.

If your name is more common than mine, or perhaps unfortunately shared with more famous individuals for whom you would not wish to be mistaken, then this might be even more pressing for you.

I have placed links to these presentations, articles, and briefing notes of mine on a Resources page on my main website and made that easily accessible. I suppose if I knew more about search engine optimization (SEO) I would know whether this helps or hinders the relative rankings of those resources in search engines. In any case, I haven’t done this to aid search engines, I’ve done it to aid searchers. It isn’t a comprehensive list by any means, but it is a list of resources with which I am proud to be associated. Moreover, if in future other things I write show up on the Internet on web pages I do not myself maintain, I will have a sensible place from which to link to them.

FastReads – 4-day loan, no holds, no renewals

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Our public library, which is great by the way, has a display of new, or newish but high demand, books which have the FastRead label on their spines. That label refers to the restricted time for a library loan on these books with no comment on the page-turning quality of their contents: 4 days with no renewal as opposed to 3 weeks with an indefinite number of renewals for fiction books without the FastRead label. The library will usually have multiple copies of such high demand books with only one or two placed in the FastRead category.

It’s always tempting to look through the books there, but I rarely sign one out. I often have multiple books on the go at any one time and setting everyone aside for a 4-day sprint read doesn’t always put one in the best reading frame of mind. It’s even more challenging if you end up spending two of those four days out of town in non-reading pursuits (dread phrase!). This past weekend I found myself engaged in just one of those intense reads that I try to avoid. Fortunately the book was worth it – William Gibson’s Zero History.

There is something about Gibson’s writing that catches and holds a pace, inundating the reader with a surfeit of brand-molested detail that feels as highly produced as the music his character, Inchmale, tends to be orchestrating for clients like The Bollards. The weave of fabric is no bad metaphor for Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy as espionage (national and industrial), fashion, marketing, and addiction are carefully intermingled. He’s got good cloth and a superior cut with fine finishing. Is it any wonder that Zero History is as desirable as Pattern Recognition and the under-valued Spook Country?

But try not to get it out on a FastRead loan from the library. Take your time and enjoy it.

FSOSS 2010 – report

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Today I attended the always interesting FSOSS event at Seneca Centre for Development of Open Technology in Toronto. I had a couple of goals for participating in the event. I hoped to get myself plugged back in to the open source community (at least more than sitting in my office permits) and there were a number of talks (and people) that I specifically wanted to see. Despite some disappointments, the high points more than compensated.

Key for me in the morning set of talks was Dru Lavigne speaking on Finding a Community (Even if You’re not a Developer). This was an excellent presentation – thorough, careful, and measured. Plenty here for anyone new to FOSS or anyone still trying to find their niche. Dru spent a fair bit of time outlining how to find a good fit for your skills. Clearly that is much easier if you are a developer and have a specific toolset. That rather narrows the field of projects to which you might contribute. But what if what you hope to offer to a FOSS project is documentation skills, or at least non-coding skills? Here the problem is that your skills are so general that you really could contribute to virtually any project. For me, the way to narrow the decision matrix in such a case is to find a project that you actually use and that you feel passionate about.

I was delighted to finally see Dru speak since I had been hearing her name (and seeing it) for some time. Worth the wait.

In the afternoon I went to a solid talk by Scott Nesbitt on FLOSS Manuals – Too Good to be True. FLOSS Manuals is the brain child of Adam Hyde, a New Zealander with a vision for facilitating documentation. And not just facilitating the creation of documentation, but rather getting documentation done! It is a long-standing truism that documentation is the bane of FOSS projects (well, any kind of project, really). Through the use of book sprints FLOSS Manuals helps with the rapid production and completion of user manuals. Scott detailed the book sprint that had been undertaken earlier in the week to create a user manual for Mozilla Thunderbird. He also pointed participants at the next generation of FLOSS Manuals, called Booki. Booki also has a Mozilla Drumbeat project, Open Web Publishing which is worth a look.

I wondered how the documentation effort in FLOSS Manuals co-ordinates or conflicts with the documentation efforts within a FOSS project. At least in the Thunderbird sprint key Mozilla Thunderbird developers directly participated. I’m not entirely certain I’m clear on whether or not the documentation effort of a FOSS project could get diffused by such work, but it’s clear that these are also live questions that are being worked out directly in practice. Scott did a good job encouraging those present to explore FLOSS Manuals further and, if possible, get involved.

The final talk that I want to mention is the one entitled Mozilla Drumbeat: open innovation for all. I had been looking forward to hearing (and seeing) Mark Surman again. I was really hoping he would clear up some muddle-headedness that I’m suffering regrading the Mozilla Foundation Drumbeat effort.  I totally get the idea of defending and extending the open web. I don’t quite understand the Drumbeat spin on this. Alas, Mark dropped out of the event, apparently having slipped off to Barcelona to help prepare for the Drumbeat Festival due to take place there next week. Okay, fair enough. Barcelona does have its attractions. And it might also be warmer than Toronto at this time of year.

Fortunately (for us) Mark was replaced by Matt Thompson. Matt did a good job in Mark’s stead. He gave a nice overview of Drumbeat’s goals. He reminded us how Mozilla Firefox defended the open web not by lobbying the powers that be, but by simply building a better browser than the massively dominant IE that was threatening the open web. Today, of course, there are many new threats to the open web, not least the attack on net neutrality. Can the Mozilla Foundation find new ways to defend and extend the open web?

I don’t know.  The Drumbeat projects highlighted all seemed very cool. I could see how they would garner lots of participation from “the people formerly known as users”. But I’m less clear on how they address the very things that Drumbeat itself identifies as threats to the open web. Of course, it could be that what really needs to be translated is the manner in which Mozilla built its fabulous open source browser. But then I would have thought I’d be hearing about a Mozilla Foundation project repository perhaps modelled on the Apache Foundation cohort of projects each of which partake to some extent in the well-tested development methodology found in the server project. There doesn’t seem to be that kind of guidance for proposed projects at this time. But perhaps it is just too soon to tell. Matt described the past year as, effectively,  Drumbeat in beta test mode. We should look for a major overhaul of both the website and (I think) the movement in the new year. No doubt that has something to do with what will be going on in Barcelona next week. If so, I look forward to the continued sharpening of the aims and objectives, and methods, that Drumbeat will seek to promote. I have a natural fondness for Mozilla, its browser, its Foundation, and a firm belief in its potential for good. I, for one, will be watching Drumbeat with anticipation in the weeks and months ahead.

All in all, it was a good day. I missed the presence of one or more significant keynote speaker. And I really don’t need another metal liquid container (which seems to be de rigueur as a participant goodie at every conference these days). And no, an extra-large t-shirt is unlikely to fit me (luckily I managed to make an exchange for a more plausible size). But most important were the people I spoke to, ate with, shared a drink with. Because community really is what FOSS is all about.