My first reaction when I looked at my referer logs and saw I’d been slashdotted was: Holy Shit! Actually it was Marc Canter’sPeopleAggregator that was the main link in the Slashdot article, but it was my interview with Marc that caused it. I’ve gotten 2000-odd visits from Slashdot so far (they’re still pouring in). This may not sound like much to some – but considering the second-best over the past year for this website was 200-odd visits in a day from a davedotting, it’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
It actually makes me realise what a small world we bloggers live in. There are many people out there who either don’t know weblogs exist or who think they’re “online diaries” (which is the description I hear most often from ‘normal’ people). But I’ve never been under any illusions that weblogging is anything but a minority sport.
Personal Publishing, on the other hand, has potential to break on through to the mainstream. As my interview with Marc illuminated, personal publishing is not just writing – it’s photos, music, movies, reviews, audio, etc. Multimedia. Anyone can create and participate. Anyone can be a producer, not just a consumer. I call it the Read/Write Web (btw that was my very first ‘official’ blog post – almost one year ago).
Another thing my interview with Marc taught me was that the people and content are the Kings of the Web. There’s been a bit of talk in the web designer world recently about focusing onpeople and not just tools. Jeffrey Zeldman asked today: “Can’t we all just get along?” – referring to the either/or arguments between web people such as semantic design vs effective design. And in the developer world, there’s the ongoing debate between simple vs complex – and variations thereof. But my specific point here is that, no matter what you’re developing or writing or composing or designing or just plain posting – the best results come when you do it for The People.
My interview with Marc is a good example – it looks like it entertained and perhaps even enlightened a lot of people (myself included). Sometimes I post silly little things that are probably only relevant to me – e.g. when I talk about my unpublished (and probably unpublishable) novel, or when I write about my hometown. I don’t do that too often, but when I do perhaps I am not thinking enough of my readers. The designers I linked to above – Keith, Paul, Zeldman – all have a habit of keeping their content focused on web design. Which is what their readers want to read and why I subscribe to them. There’s a lesson there for me.
So more interviews and less novel-gazing 😉 No seriously, I intend to supply you with further interesting web technology articles, mixed in with web design/development posts and some writing/sci-fi to keep everyone on their toes. Oh and a few more surprises of course!
