Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 10:49 am on 5/3/2008
As long as I’m bloggin’ it up: for those of you who missed, or irritatedly switched off, my flood of live tweets from this past weekend’s unstructured talk by Understanding Comics author Scott McCloud at Stumptown Comics Fest, well, here you go.
These are my paraphrases of McCloud’s comments as they went by, so if something he “says” here strikes you as horrible, be sure and check with me to make sure it wasn’t my fault. Thanks!
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Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 10:32 am on
Through no fault of my own (note: lies), I have spent a humongous amount of time on web forums in the last year. And really, they’ve always been a part of my web diet, but only in rarefied varieties – the run-of-the-mill phpBB-style forums have never been to my taste. They just feel a little bit wrong to me, like somebody is trying to hide something in a honeycomb of twisty little text boxes all alike. (It doesn’t help that people keep trying to use phpBB and its clones as blog engines. Stop that!) And increasingly, the form of forum discussions in general have started to feel stultifying, like the hammer that makes all computer-mediated communication look like a nail. An overwhelming, unfocused nail.
Forums don’t consider human needs very well. Typically, they let you know how many postings are new to you (which we know from our experience with email to be a source of nothing but stress for most people), but that’s about it. About the only helpful thing they offer to do is tell you via email when someone’s replied to you. The rest of the time, when they aren’t busy burying you in an info-snowdrift, they are exemplifying every problem and then some from Clay Shirky’s brilliant essay A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. (Haven’t read that? Do it now. Seriously. You won’t be sorry.)
It gets even worse when you set loose a lot of game designers. They (okay, we) start trying shit like “okay, everyone, only women post in this thread! Oh, and also, the notice to that effect will be in the same tiny type that the forum software uses for the categories you don’t pay attention to.” We mean well, really, we do, and experimentation is sorely needed. But without code to back it up… as often as not, humans have to intervene, and for all kinds of reasons, that makes for an emotional bear trap waiting to snap shut (usually on small game).
We sorely need actual tools – not just ideas, but tools – for shaping conversations. We need well-thought-out ways to take conversations that go off topic apart into different conversations. We need to give people the ability to restrict a thread to certain posters when they start it (transparently, please – if all we wanted were drama, we already have LiveJournal). It would be trivial to allow thread-starters to set a pace for the conversation – specifying a maximum number of replies before the thread closes to all but the thread-starter, giving them a chance to catch up and open it again. Or some other way. Or every way we can get somebody to write a plugin for. But as far as I know, no one’s even trying.
A bunch of people in the forum communities I’ve been frequenting are excited about a site called Tangler, which seems to just be a place to create your own forum, except Web 2.0′ed up in a bunch of little ways. And that’s helpful as far as it goes, but I’m like, this is all it takes to excite people? (Even though I know that what really has them excited is the simple fact that they can make themselves a new space that isn’t overwhelmed with people yet, and thus get sweet relief from the chore that a busy forum quickly becomes.)
Of course, I can’t do all this bitching without explaining why I haven’t cut some code myself to try to address these issues. Two reasons: 1) I still really need to cut back on unpaid programming projects, and 2) the sorts of problems that need solving in the forum space are not generally problems that anyone wants to admit that they have, let alone pay anyone money to have solved. People tend to think that totally free, unregulated conversation is what makes the Internet great. They are half right, and in the big picture, their half is undoubtedly the most important half. But the other half is holding all of us back. Shapelessness – lack of constraint, that is, and therefore lack of structure – too often saps conversations of all of their power to change things. When you’re lucky, you have human leaders to take charge of forums and keep them on the rails, despite all the social heat they end up taking for it. And that might always be the ideal case.
It’s possible that you can’t add much in the way of conversation-shaping constraints to forums, without making something that isn’t a forum anymore (you know, the same way that email sucks, but if you fix the problems it stops being email and having the strengths of email.) So really, this post is a plea to all of you, to try thinking about forums and how they came about, and what purpose they serve, and about whether we can do some refactoring to better serve those needs. Reading Shirky’s essay, linked above, would be an excellent start. Another start might be to look at the kinds of constraints that people apply to forums explicitly for the purpose of playing games, because games are in the end just social interaction with rules… just like forums.
Here’s a fascinating play-by-forum-post game inspired by the Myst series of adventure games, and here’s a forum that does a lot of play based on tabletop roleplaying games as well as a lot of talking about the play-by-post medium.
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Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 5:18 pm on 5/1/2008
This is a repost, retitled for the sake of our robot brothers (read: search engines), of an original, my-own-damn-words summary of the most important political writing for anyone on the American left to read today – the first chapter of Don’t Think Of An Elephant!. It’s as relevant now as when it was first published four years ago. Buy it here. But first, read on!
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Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 10:09 pm on 1/28/2008
I’m not sure what it is about AppJet. Did it really make it more possible for me to say, truthfully, unto you on this day that I made a web application yesterday? Or does it just make it feel more possible, and I could have done it just as easily with some other batch of technologies? I don’t know for sure, but when I think about writing login code, again, I get all angry, so I suspect the former.
AppJet is itself a web application, one that gives you a single text field in which to write another web application. You do this entirely in JavaScript, using some extras they’ve added to do stuff on the server. JavaScript is my favorite language, and it’s lovely both to see it get the respect it deserves in recent years, and to be able to use it to bang out web sites that do stuff. So far, I’ve made a few things: the first and simplest is MarkdownMe, an insta-service for taking text marked up (um) with Markdown and rendering it as HTML – techs out there should feel free to use this in Greasemonkey or Enso commands, as I’m doing. Another is an ongoing wiki project, which started as my first big AppJet experiment (MarkdownMe was spun off from it) and is becoming a testing ground for some wacky wikis-and-group-forming ideas I’ve got.
And the most recent is The Bucket of Truth, an electronic-wallet app I built solely because dammit, I needed it. It does exactly what’s necessary (except for the parts I haven’t built yet… I guess those are not so necessary) to track my spending against a monthly entertainment budget, and it does it fast, with no damn styling that just borks up my Treo anyway. I totally love it. And I really did write most of it yesterday.
In other nerdy news: as long ago as 1999 I was trying to build a web-based outliner – a simple one, not all mind-mappy or oriented around lengthy text notes, but just like the most basic single-level outlining you can do in a tool like OmniOutliner or Radio or Word’s outline mode. In 1999, JavaScript in the browser just wasn’t quite up to the task. Well, now the tools have matured, and after a 2.5-year break, it’s on again in a big, big way. The goal is to have something up for you to play with before the summer. In contrast to the Bucket, it is suave and handsome. Drop me a line if you want to get early access.
Lastly, Fictionsuit recently changed servers; in the future it’s going to be a testing ground too, for some thoughts I’ve been having about forums. Big, big thoughts. More on that soon.
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Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 11:08 am on 1/16/2008
Enso is now freeware. If you run Windows (and there have been allegations of a forthcoming Mac version, although Quicksilver is very good), you need to give this a try. You’ll never know how much time and attention you are wasting in your Start menu if you don’t. And don’t worry, you’ll still have access to something Caps Lock-like – it just won’t trip you up if you fat-finger Shift or Tab, ever again.
The theories behind Enso come from the work of the late Jef Raskin, who more or less created the Macintosh interface. After that went the way it went, Jef left Apple and went on to take ideas from the Mac and combine them with ideas from the command-line world, as well as some rather lovely new ideas like quasimodes, into the legendary, commercially failed machine the Canon Cat. (For a taste of why the Cat was loved by its users as well as why it was discontinued, take a look at Raskin’s open-source project Archy. Not very beautiful, indeed forbidding-looking, but run the tutorial video and its power becomes clear.)
The theories are Raskin’s, but the code behind Enso comes from his son Aza and his now-ex-colleagues at Humanized. As you can see from the Humanized website, the mistake of neglecting appearances was not made again in Enso. It is as gorgeous as it is snappy and resourceful. And unlike the first-glance inscrutability of Archy, Enso is simple – it pulls one salient idea, that of “leaping,” from the elder Raskin’s work and snaps it right into Windows as though it’s always been there. (Note that the actual “leaps” from the Cat and Archy are full-text searches, which Enso doesn’t do.)
Aza Raskin and his co-Ensoers are (mostly) now employees of the Mozilla Corporation, specifically of Mozilla Labs. Labs is already getting up to a lot of interesting stuff, and it is about to get a lot more interesting. I hope that Enso development doesn’t completely abate, or that we get something in a similar vein but even more awesome.
(Want more UI thoughts? Here’s a video of Aza Raskin doing a tech talk at Google. If that doesn’t grab you, root around some more in the Humanized weblog. And, I am sorry I was away. To quote Ze Frank, I didn’t forget about you, and I like you.)
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