{"id":2163,"date":"2004-02-28T22:00:12","date_gmt":"2004-02-29T02:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dbnews\/2004\/02\/28\/next-generation-blogging-tool\/"},"modified":"2004-02-28T22:00:12","modified_gmt":"2004-02-29T02:00:12","slug":"next-generation-blogging-tool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/2004\/02\/28\/next-generation-blogging-tool\/","title":{"rendered":"Next Generation Blogging Tool"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n

Last week the fearless leader of the Berkman Blogger’s,
\n Dave Winer<\/a>, wanted to collect some starting point design criteria for
\n the next generation of Blogging software. Since Dave believes (and we
\n concur) that software should be designed from user needs translated into
\n engineering reality rather than visa versa, he asked a select group of
\n Blogger’s whose opinion he respects as deep thinkers and super-users
\n to formulate their thoughts and functional fantasies into words.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, the Dowbrigade was not among those hoary sages asked
\n for their opinions, adding to his richly deserved reputation as the Rodney
\n Dangerfield of the Blogosphere.  The disadvantage of being identified
\n as a humor blogger is that nobody takes you seriously even when you are
\n trying to be.  Of course, the advantage is that you can dismiss
\n all of your critics as lacking a sense of humor.<\/p>\n

At any rate, never having been shy and at one point in our career practically
\n supporting ourselves by crashing parties, we will leap in with our two
\n bits. For starters, let us say that we agree with almost everything written
\n by Jim
\n Moore <\/a>in response to Dave’s query. Summing up, Jim wrote that users
\n need completely transparent, drag and drop simplicity in composing and
\n posting. <\/p>\n

We would like to expand on and modulate those comments, however. The
\n dream of a composing environment where we non-coders can drop pictures,
\n text blocks, links and media gems, move them around and arrange them
\n just the way we want them is admirable and may someday be achievable.
\n However, Macromedia and Adobe have been trying to achieve the same thing
\n in their general purpose web site design programs, and they are still
\n far from the ideal Jim imagines.<\/p>\n

As Dave himself noted browser based composition is clearly the way to
\n go. It allows designers to allow users to do common composition and uploading
\n tasks in 2 or 3 steps instead of 10 or 12.  Yet even the most advanced
\n WYSIWYG html editors like Dreamweaver, in which the Dowbrigade News
\n is composed, are far from this kind of super-simple drag and drop capability, so it
\n may take awhile to reach this holy grail<\/p>\n

It is instructive to consider the evolution of html editors, for as
\n we have repeatedly established a weblog is really just a web page with
\n some build-in functionality. Web page design options range from coders
\n who compose straight-out in html, tags and strings of code flying from
\n their fingertips to complete non-techies who simply type text into a
\n template and have no idea of how it gets onto the web. Many people,
\n like the Dowbrigade, take a middle path.<\/p>\n

This offering of a variety of modes and composition options is essential.
\n As an educator we know that different people have different learning
\n styles, and different composers have different composition styles. Some
\n may say aim for the lowest common denominator and let those who want
\n to mess with the code use a different application.  However, since
\n what goes on in the background is pretty much the same, it shouldn’t
\n be too difficult to let different kinds of users access the functionality
\n in different ways.<\/p>\n

The key to offering the capability to arrange and position elements
\n within postings seems to be tables.  As a web page designer and
\n blogger we find tables indispensable in placing specific content in specific
\n places on the page. Although our initial understanding of cascading style
\n sheets was that they were designed to do pretty much the same thing,
\n we could never get them to do more than preserve formatting styles across
\n a site of disparate pages, and we still use tables for placement in just about all the pages we design. However,
\n we have yet to find a really easy and flexible table tool. <\/p>\n

Without knowing whether it would be technically possible, we can imagine
\n self-adjusting table cells such that when a user drops an image or other
\n object into a page an invisible table cell is automatically generated
\n which instantly adjusts as the user moves the object around the page.
\n This ability to spatially arrange elements, combine with the common
\n skills of using a basic formatting pallet, would give even complete non-coders
\n a high degree of intuitive control over the appearance and functionality
\n of their content.<\/p>\n

In general, we think the principles of simplicity and modifiability,
\n both of the creation and viewing environments, should be the touchstones
\n of the next generation of blogging tools. And of course, it must be
\n integrated with the next generation of aggregators. We would suggest
\n that the aggregator be a central feature of the new blogging tools, both
\n as content collector and as a feature for readers.  As Jim suggests,
\n finding, subscribing and unsubscribe from streams should be made as
\n simple and intuitive as possible.The aggregator should be enabled to
\n handle as wide a variety of embedded enclosures as possible; audio, video,
\n text, etc., and should be completely configurable in that the user can
\n select, for each feed, how much to display of headlines, body and graphics,
\n and what to do with enclosures.<\/p>\n

In fact, users should have the option of using the aggregator by itself
\n and ignoring the blogging part of the equation altogether. In fact, the
\n Dowbrigade already has two Manila blogs set up expressly for that purpose.
\n If a user wants, their aggregator could BE their blog, simply a controlled
\n information flow reflecting the interests and character of the owner.<\/p>\n

If a product could do all that, the Dowbrigade would be severely tempted
\n to actually break down and PAY for it. Unless we can finagle a copy as
\n a beta tester….<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week the fearless leader of the Berkman Blogger’s, Dave Winer, wanted to collect some starting point design criteria for the next generation of Blogging software. Since Dave believes (and we concur) that software should be designed from user needs … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1443],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-esl-links"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}