Oblomovka

2008-09-17»

When I was ill off school, I remember sitting and just mashing the remote control, as I flicked through endless channels (although actually it must have been just four, thinking about it). I’ve been doing much the same thing today, when I’ve been awake: flicking through a handful of sites, hitting -R on each.. I seriously wonder how much of the success of the Web has actually been down to the instant response of this pleasure-seeking behavour? And I wonder, when the traditional press (and advertisers) marvel at the huge audiences of sites like digg.com, slashdot.org, or the drudge report, do they realise how much of those high audiences really comes down to just reload fever?

Back in 2001, stymied by the fact that slashdot.org had eaten NTK’s breakfast by posting daily (NTK’s weekly feed was predicated on the fact that by pushing out every seven days, we could beat Wired’s deadlines by about two months), I tried to project where this was all heading. If the news cycle was shortening to a day, what kind of site would beat slashdot’s daily schedule? I sketched out the design for a website that would just throw news up as fast as it was happening; where you’d suck all of the wires, run them through a document-clustering algorithm, spit out the summaries of any new stories onto an IRC channel ,and have a team just come up with a suitable headline for those clusters (for those of you who knew me back then, that’s what I was talking about when I talked about spoolfeed.com). Story clusters would keep the same permanent URLs, so that once you’d bookmarked a story, any new developments would append to that page (and keep it high in the search ranks).

Spoolfeed’s really evil part, its elevator pitch for cackling VCs, would be that it would always change when you hit reload — no matter how quickly you hit reload. Stories that hadn’t changed between page views would be discarded, so only new items would appear. If you really did use up all the top stories, the space would be filled with the strange edge stories — clumsily translated Portugese news, crummy press releases from business wire. Just make every reload do something.

I felt kind of dirty when I came up with that, because I felt like I was feeding the monster that was eating everyone’s brain. But it also felt inevitable that sites would head this way. I’m surprised that digg.com doesn’t do it now to be honest. Feed the reload beast, and the world’s foolish advertisers and journalists will come baying at your door for your precious hitrates.

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Sorry, I’ve been super-ill today, and so remarkably short on spiffing ideas: so let me point you to this meta-idea on why you shouldn’t write a book.

1. People who have a lot of ideas need a blog, not a book.
A blog is more immediate, so you’ll get better feedback. And getting feedback as you go is much more intellectually rigorous than printing a final compendium of your ideas and getting feedback from the public only when it’s too late to change anything.

Many people think they have a ton of ideas and they are brimming with book possibilities when in fact, most of us have very few new ideas. If you have so many ideas, prove it to the world and start blogging. There is nothing like a blog to help you realize you have nothing new to say.

Also, note that if you want to get ideas out there, it’s a remarkably inefficient method these days. Especially for the sort of low-grade, rumblingly conjectural micro-ideas most of us are shedding. Just keep spilling them out, and don’t worry if they don’t get purchase. It’s the cheap and cheerful end of innovation. If you’re truly lazy, as all good authors should be, you’ll thank yourself for manipulating others to pick them up and run with them, without even having to spell them out completely yourself. I think in many ways the most economically-efficient idea would be one which was easily conveyable in a few sentences, yet would be irresistably tempting for a Ph.D. student to want to turn into a thesis or project.

Would anyone like to create some empirical research on that?

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