Thirty Stories Up

Hey, everyone, sorry for the long hiatus. Moving turned out to take a few days, and my Internet access has been on and off (thank you, campus IT). Anyway, I’m back and settled in at my university in Queens, NY, and classes are already in full swing. I hope you’ve all been well in the meantime, and I look forward to providing a few minutes of interesting reading every day to you all again.

That said, it only takes a few months to forget how busy the college lifestyle is, despite the abundance of free time you seem to have as a student. Today is a particularly busy day for me (5 hours of class), which from the standpoint of my job over the summer seems like nothing. Yet with homework, reading, studying, and organizing notes, that can quickly stack to more than 8 hours in any given day. It’s going to be interesting to see how I can handle both school and my job moving forward.

Still, good news is not entirely absent. I’ve got one of my favorite philosophy professors, so you can look forward to (I hope) some engaging thoughts on philosohpy any time I feel particularly inspired. My business classes look to be trending towards the basic and easy, so aside from the time investment, that shouldn’t be much trouble. And, lest I forget the largest part of the college life, I’m back with my friends. After having lived as somewhat of a social hermit for the last three months at my apartment, it’s nice to be back living Aamong interesting people who I know. Of course, I wouldn’t dream of depriving any of my readers of the experience, which is why there are going to be a few more regular pages in the StudentNYC network written by students here at some point this semester.

Also, climate control could very well be the single biggest factor in my happiness right now. It’s nice to be able to sit down and write with the air conditioning on full blast, and anything that makes it easier to write should also be increasing my output. This means I should be able to pick back up with the other writing projects I’ve been working on, and I hope to have some news about those in the near future.

For now, it’s back to the grind of the first few days for me. I’ll try and get some more writing done ASAP, and hopefully I won’t be missing any more days anytime soon.

From five stories over Jamaica, NY, this is Kurt.

Filed under: Life in NYC
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Well, it’s the end of a very short but satisfying era; my time as an FTE (Full-Time Employee) is over, replaced instead by the heady pursuit of knowledge. But fear not, I’ll still occasionally actually be posting from thirty stories up; part-time work is a wonderful thing, and part-time work for a good employer doubly so. I just need to break up some of that work with gaining a bit of knowledge to manage.

It’s been a good summer, though. I managed to survive my first summer moved out of the house, and in fact moved entirely out of my hometown; from a pair of secret underground locations in Ridgewood (my college roommate’s basement apartment, and my own) I managed to live what could be considered the ideal NYC student lifestyle; living in Queens, working in Manhattan, with just enough money to eat decently and keep a nice apartment, but not enough to lose my status as an indie cult icon (okay, I was kidding about that last part). I had a job that gave me great experience with the business sphere, which I was blissfully ignorant of before, and the experience from that alone is worth a few seasons’ worth of living simply.

That’s not to say I didn’t live it up a bit, though. There’s all sorts of great free and cheap stuff to do in Manhattan if you know where to look and listen for it. Concerts, plays, street performances… it really is all at your fingertips in a city like New York, which is a huge change from small-town suburbia. That, and I have great friends both at home and here in the city, who help me through the rough times and cheer me in the good times.

But fear not, those who like hearing about NYC! I’m not moving away, merely making a slight shift within a single borough, to my university campus in northern Queens. I’ll be poorer one apartment, but richer one roommate, one Honors Commons, and fifteen college credits, all of which I’m sure you’ll be hearing about at some point.

Did I think it would turn out okay in early May? Honestly, no. I had a lot of trouble finding my own apartment, and my roommates and friends bailed me out of bad situations more than once. My job was unlike any I’ve had before. I was living away from family, away from friends, and I hadn’t (and still haven’t) seen my hometown since February.

But there came a point about two weeks in, in which I realized it was time to give up or put up. I decided to put up (is giving up ever really an option?) and hunted down my apartment, put in the extra work to excel at my job, and decided after far too long of empty self-promises to crack down and get to the writing seriously.

And in the end, as always, stubborness and hard work won the day, and I had one of the best summers of my life. One of the most emotional, most exhausting, most endurance-draining and exceptionally testing summers, but (I like to think) I came out of it a richer, fuller, more complete person. And that’s what it’s all about in the end, isn’t it?

With that said, I may be incommunicado for some number of days, as I can’t guarantee that I’ll have Internet access at any given point. Campus IT may or may not be the subject of many a rant, we’ll see. If I am out of touch, you’ll get a photo entry every day until I am.

From one vacating story under Ridgewood, this is Kurt.

Filed under: Life in NYC
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In the interests of continuing my 14-hour shift today, I’ll refrain from my usual unqualified banter. Instead, I shall give you an independent-study link on why I don’t live in Japan, and to complement that, a haiku about my inbox.

Begin with Kancho.

And now, a haiku:

Please stop sending me
Spam disguised in haiku form
Or face your demise.

From thirty stories up and twelve hours in, this is Kurt.

Filed under: Column
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Sometimes even I get overambitious with my writing. Right now, I’m writing for 8 hours a day at work, and then coming home and managing to write something daily for this site, and managing semi-regular updates on Rumblings of Darkness as well, not to mention several other projects that I have ongoing. Any given one of these is manageable on its own, and even in most combinations I can handle it.

But a few hours extra at work in a day, or inspiration on one project drying up, can lead to a writer abandoning a good project unintentionally. In an effort to avoid becoming overwhelmed with any one task, we get ‘multiwhelmed’; we can keep up a few projects, but we might realize that we totally forgot to write something we needed to for a day or two.

I’m especially guilty of this lately; extra time on work has cut into my fiction time, so Rumblings of Darkness has been updating once a week instead of my more ambitious once a day until I can get back on track, and StudentNYC gets updates on the ever-so-reliable ‘when I can manage it’ schedule. I do try to get something up here every day, but even that can be a struggle depending on how busy I am.

Of course, since it’s becoming a problem, I’m trying to develop a solution for myself. First and foremost is to try and develop a routine for my daily writing; there’s less chance of a project falling through the cracks if I can get into the habit of spending a certain amount of time on each one. This approach has its shortcomings, however; there are days when I simply can’t put in the amount of time I want to allocate; should I abbreviate each writing session and get out a bunch of content I might not be happy with, or should I concentrate on quality for my most important projects and leave lower-priority projects for another time? I tend to lean towards the latter, but obviously if I develop an audience for one project, I don’t want them feeling as if I don’t think they’re as important as the audience for something else.

Then there’s the issue of inspiration. With work and nonfiction, this isn’t so much a problem; a knowledge of the facts and dedication to writing will get the content done, even though it can’t always assure a good structure (I try my best, though!). But sometimes with fiction and even with a daily article-based blog such as this one, I simply have a hard time moving myself forward, and the more I tend to write in a day, the less expeditiously I can ‘crank out’ a day’s quota on any given fresh project or creative writing.

I’m not entirely convinced that these creative limits my mind seems to impose are an entirely bad thing; maybe there’s only so much creative content I can put forth on a normal day, and since I’m writing more than I ever have before, perhaps I’m just discovering the outside limits to how much I can manage at once. Or maybe I just need to discover a writing schedule that lets me mix things up a little more, so my creative batteries can recharge while I’m writing fiction. However, work and school put real constraints on just how flexible I can be.

I’ll keep experimenting with different possibilities, however, and hopefully I’ll find something that lets me maximize my output a little more while keeping the standard of quality I like to think I maintain. As always, I welcome comments on how you other writers deal with being multiwhelmed by your own multitudes of projects.

From thirty multiwhelmed stories up, this is Kurt.

Filed under: Column
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Caring about other people’s feelings has officially jumped the shark with this news story out of New Hampshire. While I don’t normally do ‘news’ blog entries, I feel like this is an important thing that needs some public attention.

I am referring, for those of you who don’t click links, to the story of a New Hampshire doctor being investigated by the state Attorney General for allegedly (well, admittedly) telling one of his patients that she was overweight, and launching into an apparently typical tirade about how it affects a patient’s health and life. This, as far as the facts are concerned, is based in solid and sound medical science. Obesity is a medical term with a medical definition, so it can hardly be construed as an insult when it’s true.

But let’s just spare a moment and go ‘awww’ for the woman whose feelings were apparently hurt. Because that’s all the sympathy she deserves, and even that’s stretching the bounds of my generosity and credibility. This ’self-esteem’ and ‘positive self-image’ junk that they’ve begun drilling into people’s heads from a young age are finally showing the side effects; nobody really believes that there’s anything wrong with them, and shame on the professional who would dispel that illusion with some solid and sound medical fact.

What’s so wrong with an appeal to truth instead of self-image for once? Why is it so wrong to tell people solid fact at the cost of their carefully constructed false image of the way the world is? The attorney general who did anything more than hang up on this woman needs to take a sensitivity course himself; he offends me by his blatant disregard for the value of truth occasionally kicking sensitivity to the ground and administering to it the savage beating of reality.

Filed under: Column
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I’m fairly certain TV has either given up entirely, or is actively working against me. For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been going generally without television this summer; the TV in my apartment only picks up three channels clearly, none of which I particularly want to watch. Still, there are evenings, like tonight, when I come home and want to douse myself in the lowest common denominator for a while.

I had no idea that the lowest common denominator was a monosyllabic, talking tooth.

No, seriously. For my UK readers (since I’m pretty sure everyone in the States has seen more TV than me in the last few months), we have a fast-food chain called Wendy’s. It used to be known for honest, sincere if cheesy commercials featuring Dave Thomas, an earnest man who loved a burger with four corners too many. Now, their main claim to fame is apparently that their advertising has given up any semblance of the generally accepted forms of advertising as I learned them in school. They’ve copped out on celebrity appeal, they’ve deprioritized mass appeal, and they’ve given up on image and style. Instead, we get commercials featuring a tooth that says the word ‘Ranch’ over and over. I don’t doubt that Wendy’s will retroactively propagate the story that he’s a ‘Ranch Tooth’, in the vein of a sweet tooth.

But only retroactively, as I fear Wendy’s is the latest business to take marketing to its newest and most worrying length; flat-out psychological warfare on the consumer. There is little doubt in my mind that we’ve moved on from the clumsy days of creating advertising that conveys useful information or some sort of message or theme. Clear Channel was probably the first to master this; their open ‘focus groups’ consist of everyong being seated in front of two buttons that represent “like” and “don’t like”. You get a five-second snippet of a song opening; far too short to judge anything about the theme or quality of the song. You have to listen to your five-second snippet, and hit a button encapsulating your feelings on this five seconds into a binary choice of ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The songs with the highest ‘yes’ ratio make it, everybody else moves to the back of the line.

I think Wendy’s is just the latest to master this. I bet they had one focus group just looking at a rapid-fire stream of images, hitting ‘yes’ whenever they saw something that stirred some strong feeling in them; in the next room over, a bunch of people with headphones on do the same with random strings of words. It just so happens on the day a Wendy’s exec wanders by that the two winning concepts are a picture of a tooth, and the word ranch.

We’re no longer marketed to, we’re targeted. Our reactions to language and image itself are being studied, and those studies are being used to actually increase the noise ratio of advertising so much that signal itself is lost, and we have to rely on our gut instinct, which sees the Wendy’s logo, remembers that tooth and the word Ranch, and somewhere deep within, sets a stirring thought that ‘Yes, I’ll buy now!’ We’ve actually entered a brave new world where marketers aren’t selling a product, they’re selling the population’s average responses to concepts.

So how do we get back at them? We need to unfocus their focus groups. Next time you see an ad for a focus group offering fifty bucks for two hours of hitting a button, apply. Then proceed to throw a wrench in the works by voting for the most bizarre, otherwordly images that don’t actually appeal to you, and then put the fifty bucks towards something worthier than a burger advertised by a denizen of a dental health facility, like a worthwhile charity or a local organization that would appreciate it. Because if anyone needs fifty bucks, it’s not someone who can hit a button for two hours just to tell a marketer how to make us say “How many?” when they tell us to buy.

Filed under: Column
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I know that several of the people who regularly read this site are either aspiring (or accomplished!) authors or associated creative types, and that a few more write stories on a semi-regular basis and are probably better than you give yourselves credit for. I have to recommend that you check out the Writers’ Blog Alliance, at least briefly, and if you have any serious interest in writing at all you should probably bookmark it. It’s an interesting experiment in taking the conventional wisdom of blogging, and mixing that with a style better suited to serious readers and writers. Their mission is to build from scratch, via all the ‘good blogging techniques’ that build traffic and search engine rankings, a marketplace for writers, readers, and publishers to come together to hopefully benefit everyone.

It’s not your usual blog; right now it’s mostly populated with a few extremely dedicated, qualified professional writers, and a smattering of interested amateurs such as myself. Still, if any blog-like project is worth getting in on the ground floor of, this is it; the Web in general and blogs in particular reward creating lots of unique content, and since the target audience of this one by definition creates lots of unique content, I have a hard time predicting that this won’t hit critical mass and take off sometime soon. If I may allow myself a Dvorak-esque moment of visionary punditry, within five years you’ll see an author who got his start from publishing in the WBA reviewed in the New York Times.

Of course, there’s still the bar of the publishing industry to discourage writers without a following or previous works from putting out what they have, right? Well, another new site that I think the WBA is going to heavily rely on in the future is Lulu. This is an on-demand publishing service with no barrier of entry, so even authors with niche audiences (read: their family and a few friends) can get their work in book form. This post on the WBA explains how Lulu can be a useful stepping stone to getting a mainstream publisher (I almost said “real publisher”, but the books you get from Lulu aren’t any less real than what you get off Amazon).

As much as I hate buzzwords, I’m having a hard time holding that demon invocation “synergy” from slipping onto the page. Lulu helps new writers get their books in a tangible form, WBA helps authors build both their skill sets and their profile, and authors who become successful through WBA draw new interest and new potential authors in.

We all know at least one indie musician that’s better than the pop-manufactured junk that the music industry puts out. If we all know at least one, that would indicate there’s a lot. Who’s to say there’s not just as many talented authors out there that aren’t even getting noticed?

Filed under: Life in NYC
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My little tirade on MoonEdit and the simplicity I need in a text editor yesterday got me thinking about the things writers and other professional content creators need, and what the major companies are actually giving us. Most think of writing as a ‘tool-less’ trade, or at the very least, still cling to the idea that the modern content creator is, as in the days of old, still essentially sitting at a typewriter pounding keys all day, when I don’t think anything is farther from the truth. For dedicated bloggers like those following 31 Days to a Better Blog, this is especially true, since there are so many chances to work with bad tools along the way to creating good content and a good site.

First, a caveat; tools will never improve you as a writer, only writing will. You can be able to write a mediocre sentence, invest lots of time and money into finding the ideal tools for writing, and still only be able to write a mediocre sentence. But if you’re at the top of your game, the right tools can make all the difference in how easy it is for you to sit down and let the writing flow, without worrying about anything else.

Don’t Forget Your Fingers
First, and I think often too-overlooked, you should look into a good keyboard. I know many of us in the generations that are just now starting to come into our own as writers and content creators have never used anything but the flimsy QuietKey keyboard that came with our computers. But if you do a lot of typing and have a nice place to type by yourself (not a dorm room), I strongly, strongly recommend that you at least look into trying out an older-style ‘clicky’ keyboard, based on the old IBM Model M keyboard series. They’re sturdy like you wouldn’t believe, have great feedback both in the click noise and the keypress sensation, and they can wake up the neighbors if you’re not careful. They used to be highly prized because they were hard to find, but PCKeyboards now sells a variety of keyboards based off the old buckling spring technology.

Don’t Overprocess Your Words
Second, you need to take a look at your word processor. You might wonder how anything could compete with the feature-packed writing suites we see today, especially Microsoft Word. The importance is in distractions. I can’t stand to use Word until I go into the settings menu and rip out every bit of automation in there, and even then, I prefer SciTE unless I actually need to do formatting for a document. Autocorrect and spellcheck will never compensate for proofreading, and there’s nothing that interrupts my flow of thought more than having things move where I’m not typing, or having to go back and fix a phrase that got autocorrected by Word. Simplicity is key for me when I’m actually writing, so I prefer a small, straightforward text editor for writing, and I only go to the big suites when I need to format what I’ve already written. This is probably the only thing in this post that will materially help your writing, by helping your concentration and cutting out distractions.

Mind your Surroundings
If you have the power to change what’s around you when you write, your environment itself can become a tool to help your writing. Personally, I can’t stand to write with anything moving around me; I need to close blinds, doors, and cut myself off to prevent myself from being distracted. However, I know other writers who thrive off of being in open, busy spaces to have some other stimulus for their writing; it depends on your style and temperment, but by all means, pay some attention to what works for you and seek out a workspace that has it. In addition, if you live in a dorm room or another environment when you can’t necessarily control the noise during your writing times, look into a good pair of noise-canceling headphones (the kind that quiet the room even while not playing any music).

Don’t Hurt Yourself!
Also, I can’t emphasize ergonomics enough. Go find a guide on setting up a workspace, if you’re not familiar with basic ergonomics. Nothing is more distracting to me than finding I’ve only been writing for an hour and already feeling my back be uncomfortable, my hands hurting, wrists sore, or any other minor bodily discomfort. Familiarize yourself with your ergonomic needs and set up accordingly. If you spend a lot of hours a day, keep a few basics in arms’ reach, including a stress ball or putty to stretch your hand somewhat, eyedrops in case the monitor strain gets too stressful, and a low-grade Tylenol or similar for soothing minor aches.

I hope these tips help a few of you who have the will to write, and feel free to contribute any more tips for useful tools for writers!

Filed under: Life in NYC
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Yes, I know that many, many text editors claim to be for writers, and that most of them are overblown, overproduced packages with useless features and a library of boilerplate functions that encourage everyone who thinks that great writing can be learned from a textbook to push out more formulaic dreck. Most of them put out a new version every year, hoping to convince people on the old version that the art of writing has changed considerably in twelve months and that they can’t possibly type contemporary, gripping text unless they upgrade.

MoonEdit is not that. MoonEdit is what I claimed in the title: a text editor for writers. Yes, all of them. At once.

Those of you on the Mac platform may have seen a program called SubEthaEdit some time ago that does the same thing. Essentially, what it does is allow several people to connect to each other to write text on the same document, at the same time. This isn’t one of those clumsy MS Word hacks where one person can watch the other’s screen as they type and then take over; no, this actually allows several people to work on the document simultaneously, lets you track who’s writing through color coding, and handles everything with no confusion unless two people actually are trying to add content at the same cursor position. Combine this with the minimal interface that I seek out with my text editors (my current favorite, SciTE, is a perfect example of what to look for in a simple but powerful editor), and you have something that’s pretty much ideal for writing collaboration.

Even though I don’t write much fiction anymore, this has me interested enough in the possibilities to start again. Imagine being able to have someone edit your work in real-time; one person can have their literary flow on and just be pounding out the content, and another can be editing that work live, making changes as necessary. Of course, this only works if you trust someone else enough to edit for you; the solitary writer type won’t get much new out of this.

I just love the ideas that could come out of this. One of my personal literary weaknesses is dialogue; I can set a scene, set a mood, establish a character, but I’m weak at getting anything convincing to come out of their mouths. I’d love to be able to concentrate on setting the scene and story, while watching someone more skilled in the arcane literary arts than myself edit the story to make the dialogue flow better.

I know that several of you out there are writers. Let me know what you think of the idea, or better, grab the software and let’s try it out sometime, and see if I’m just swept away by the novelty of yet another shiny technological tool or if this is a genuinely interesting tool for writing.

Filed under: Life in NYC
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Some of you may not understand the perils of living in a small town in suburban America; you may live in one and just not be aware of the seething horror crawling under the surface, or you may have lived in a city your whole life and just not understand how things are outside the city limits. Some of you, like our good friend Clive, may just be too comforted by the niceties of suburban life to realize that they’re the actors in Act the First of a horror movie the scale of which has never been seen on the silver screen.

With that in mind, and with a warning to the faint of intellect, I give you my good friend WshCaps’ analysis of the high literary content of the letters section of the Daily Times of Salisbury, Maryland. I stress to you that he’s not kidding; in fact, if you go through his archives, you’ll find several more of these entries.

This sort of thing has to make you wonder sometimes. Do we really live in a world with people like this? Do you see these people every day on the road, in the grocery store, at the gym, and just not realize that such profoundly disturbingly vapid things can pour forth from their pens? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the writers’ spark; but just as the spark can ignite the flame of reason, it can also set off the propane tank of thoughtlessness and shallowness, embedding the shrapnel of wasted time in the intellects of those innocent bystanders who happen to be passing by those words at the time.

Of course, his baiting of these people, while I do condone it, raises the question of whether all it took was one initial letter of this sort to provoke a flurry of sarcastic responses from the well-meaning and deep-thinking intellectual community of Salisbury, which has merely perpetuated itself through massive but entertaining intellectual dishonesty. And by baiting them, are we merely having harmless fun, or are we doing a disservice to those who could be enlightened by a pages-long manifesto on setting priorities and elementary logic?

From long experience (okay, not so much experience, and not for so long), my personal belief is that education is useless unless it’s wanted. And these people, by seeking out their like-minded fellows to engage in discourse with rather than, say, subscribing to a newspaper consisting of something other than 80% recycled wood pulp and 20% ink containing an aggregate level of intellect at a concentration somewhere around that of Mets fans in the organized crime families of New York (that is to say, a number that probably cannot be precisely zero, but is so close as to make no difference whatsoever to the outcome of any figures using it), are unsubscribing to the newsletter of rational thought, and closing the door on the long-respected institutes of logic and philosophy.

That said, I want to sell Weather Rocks to these people.

Filed under: Life in NYC
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Okay, despite the alarmist nature of the post title, I’m not crazy. I don’t think blogs are going to start World War III or inspire the next season of ‘24′. But I do think blogging has become the latest front in the content war that inevitably flares up in every corner of the Internet.

Our good friend Darren over at ProBlogger has an excellent sitrep on the latest battle flaring up, over the controversy over excluding free hosted blogs from blog search domains such as Icerocket. The crux of the situation is that free hosting such as Google’s own Blogger is increasingly the domain of pages that exist solely to propogate spam.

The problem is inevitable in any sector of the Internet, and to be honest, I’m surprised it’s taken this long to come to a head with respect to the free services. You’re going to have a problem with spam anywhere that the word ‘free’ comes into play, and with the already-known potential of blogs as machines for generating PageRank and search engine results, the spammers have been forming the battle lines for a long time now. It’s just gotten to the scale that, with so many legitimate authors signing up for free blogs, the spammers hoped their noise would be lost in the signal. Then a few more tried, and a few more, and suddenly we have the current situation on Blogger, where the noise drowns out the signal.

Not that I can deceive myself that this is a new problem. We’ve all known that blogging has a spam problem for a long time now. In fact, I’m encouraged by Ice Rocket looking at such a drastic move as eliminating Blogger blogs from their results. What we’re seeing now is the blogging community recognizing that there is a problem, realizing the magnititude of it, and considering firing their own first shots in solving it. I realize that a lot of people on Blogger realize that they’re going to suffer for this, at least in terms of search engine hits and results on blog aggregation services, especially if more aggregators follow Ice Rocket’s lead.

Which brings me to my point on weaponizing blogs. We as blog authors need to encourage the legitimate authors who feel threatened by these moves to move away from the free services like Blogger that, at the moment, seem to be doing too little to stop spam blogs. How can we weaponize our legitimate blogs and turn them into spam-fighting machines?

A Call to Arms

The best way is to prove that we’re a community outside of the free services, that can exist without subsidizing ourselves with spammers. Encourage legitimate bloggers who are on free services to move to their own domains; personally, I’d be glad to help anyone on Blogger or a .info domain who wants to move to a real domain get set up with my web hosting provider, who offers a one-click Wordpress install. In fact, contact me and ask for help getting set up, and I’ll give you a promo code for $20 off of your initial signup costs and help setting up your site. And for anyone running a blog domain with a ton of unused subdomains left, offer them up to people. I know a lot of us with our own fully-hosted domains can spare the bandwidth, disk space, and subdomain names. Let’s put them to good use and get people to solid blogging ground if they want.

And any of you other bloggers who want to help but can’t spare domain space, let’s figure out what we can do. Leave some comments here, and let’s see what we can figure out about helping legitimate content providers dissociate from spammers.

Filed under: Life in NYC
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So continuing with my articles for the ‘31 Days to a Better Blog‘ series, I thought I’d talk a bit about content management systems, how they helped the Web take off in the hands of content creators, and what the implications are for blogging and the direction of the Web in the future.

Uphill Both Ways - Before CMS

In the early days of the Web, not just everyone had a site; those few of us that did had a ‘home page’, the term du jour of the 1990s that fell out of vogue as quickly as that of ‘blogging’ rose up. Your ISP, or perhaps a dedicated web hosting company, would give you a few megabytes of space on their Web server, and you’d be free to muck around in that space as long as you didn’t want to run any dynamic scripts that they hadn’t approved; there were HTML editors out there that supported dynamic content, but you almost had to run your own server to take advantage of them. The end result was a lot of people coding pages in FrontPage or by hand, updating them for a while, and then getting frustrated when the page grew past a certain point; when you needed to change one link on every page, you either had to do it by hand or write a script to do it, and errors inevitably crept in.

However, we finished walking uphill in the snow both ways long ago. With the rise of more and more web hosts allowing dynamic scripting, and the growth in popularity of server-friendly languages like PHP, more and more people found that a collection of HTML files wasn’t the best approach anymore. People began compiling those scripts from the early days into larger collections, and then someone got the bright idea of having the scripts write the HTML on demand and pull the information from a compact, secure database, saving on disk space, maintenence, and manual coding.

And thus the Web entered the age of the Content Management System, tools for putting together content in a page without troubling yourself with the little details like writing HTML (if you had told me in 1998 that writing HTML was a ‘little detail’, I would have laughed myself into a coma. But I was young then, and not wise in the ways of the CMS.). Of course, the most popular of these, and the one with the most public awareness, is the weblog; blogging has enjoyed the same sort of meteoritic growth as tulip prices in European markets and my ego at college.

But blogs aren’t the only form of CMS, and the other important forms of CMS are (probably unfairly) overlooked too often. The two notable forms of CMS that I’ll talk about here are the wiki and the knowledge base.

Going wiki in the knees

The wiki was invented in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, named after the Hawaiian word for ‘quick’. The essence of the wiki is community editing; instead of trusting the users with comments like most blogs do, the wiki is designed instead to trust the users with the article itself. A full-fledged wiki can be started by the administrator, abandoned, and still maintained and expanded by the community (though obviously, this isn’t a great way to build traffic or maintain a reputation for yourself!).

The major upside of a wiki, at least compared to a blog, is the extensive possibility for community involvement. Your users get more significant buy-in for the site when they help maintain it themselves, and administrators get the advantage of splitting their duties between content creation and editing. This is especially useful in corporate and business environments, which is the major growth area for wiki tools (I’ve implemented two business wikis at previous jobs, and both businesses were thrilled with the results). It’s much harder with hobby or niche sites; you generally don’t have a captive audience to ‘lock-in’ to the wiki, and the single biggest hurdle to wikis taking off that I’ve seen is getting users to try editing in the first place; once they start, they love it, but only once in a great while does one start.

That said, there are several large downsides to wikis, some of which you can find in my previous posts. Aside from the trouble of getting people to contribute, you have to deal with the content and editorial problems that come with an open content system. There’s always the risk of bad content or advertising disguised as content, though on small hobby wikis I haven’t seen that too much as a problem. The much bigger problem is spammers abusing the system to insert their own links invisibly, trying to increase their rankings at the expense of your own site’s bandwidth and page rankings. I have pretty direct experience with this, having just cleaned an invisible spam infestation out of StudentNYC that remained there long enough to give me a PageRank of 0. If you abandon a wiki, assume that it will be compromised before too long.

You Have a (Share)Point

The other major form of CMS floating around on the Web right now is the Knowledge Base or Team Services type of site; the biggest example is Microsoft’s SharePoint. It basically provides a web interface to a document managagement system, almost invariably with add-ons like calenders, contact lists, to-do lists, et cetera. There’s big money in implementing these sites for corporations, although their usage for hobbyists is probably strictly limited to running one on your own private network to share documents between computers. Even then, the bells and whistles never seem to see much use; everyone already has a favorite tool for calenders and e-mail.

Beyond Just Blogging

So what do these tools have to do with the growth of the Web? Well, the major search engines were designed in the days when a human could only manageably do so many pages; directories could list everyone by category, and search engines could just index the directories. Now, of course, the Web is far too large to reasonably expect directories to keep track of all the domains out there, much less all the sites (anyone who has tried to get listed in Yahoo or DMOZ knows what I mean!). Algorithms had to be developed to automatically figure out how trustworthy and linkworthy a site was, and CMS software, properly designed, dovetails perfectly with those algorithms to give its content a very high ranking.

But why should anyone care, besides the few extra hits a day they can get from Google with proper search engine optimization? Simple: while the Internet as a whole and the blogoshape in particular has quickly jumped on the CMS bandwagon, corporate America, by and large, hasn’t. So where does this leave your average blogger? In an outstanding position to capitalize on the situation. We’ve hit a unique point where a product blog can outperform the product’s actual static site with some ease, depending on the product, and this could have startling ramifications on marketing on the Internet as a whole.

We’re going to see a lot of noise in this equation: blogs capitalizing on the situation to cash in on popular product keywords and stay atop the rankings. But we’re also going to see some good signal here from honest bloggers who want to spread information and encourage discussion. To anyone who discounts blogs: this is going to be the impact that’s remembered, not just allowing your cousin Bob to have a website of his own.

Filed under: Life in NYC
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