Color me unconvinced. Blogs and social media can’t mimic the sense of community or conversation forums can. Blog comment threads have been compared to forums, but the problem with blogs is that, most of the time, only one person can create a post. That one person ends up setting the tone of the conversation and determining what everyone talks about. The fact that many popular blogs on general enough topics end up resorting to the “open thread” to allow people to talk about topics that the blog author hasn’t seen fit to post on suggests that such blogs are missing something by not having forums where anyone can post.

One of the blogs I regularly follow is the Frank the Tank’s Slant blog, which became rather unexpectedly popular after its author wrote a rather provocative post on college football conference realignment. Shortly thereafter, the author decided to launch a forum for the site, but shuttered it shortly thereafter, citing as part of the reason why that he liked that “each blog post has turned into a free flow discussion on expansion issues, with news articles and viewpoints converging in a centralized place”, preferring not to have to hop to different places to follow a discussion. To each his own, but I find that to be something I don’t like about Frank the Tank’s Slant: that each comment thread becomes an unwieldy stream-of-consciousness discussion of issues tangentially related to the subject of the post and impossible to follow in full, because people are using the most recent post, whatever it is, to put up links, current news articles, and other such things they wouldn’t need to use the post for if they could start a thread on a forum. (I have a feeling what “Frank the Tank” really wants is a chat room, or something else akin to a forum with one thread.)

Nor am I convinced by the argument that these issues can be averted by stringing several blogs together and allowing them to “talk” to each other using trackbacks. Blogs are not Facebook, and blog posts are not forum posts. Being a blog author necessarily makes you the center of attention for that blog, and within the confines of that blog you’re expected to speak with a voice of authority, to everyone, at least when it comes to actual posts. Even if you don’t want to use your blog this way, no one follows every single blog in existence, so you’re expected to provide some summary of what you’re responding to to get people up to speed. Obviously, such circumstances don’t lend themselves to conversational discussion.

Sites like Facebook, meanwhile, have many of the same problems as blogs, while also in some ways having the opposite problem. Facebook does not lend itself easily to organizing discussions according to topic as opposed to who your friends are, and similarly you can only hope to even find a discussion, let alone follow it, on Twitter by already following someone involved in the conversation, and preferably at least two, and to follow it in real time you pretty much have to be following all of the participants. Ironically considering their alleged nature, such sites don’t lend themselves well to creating a community around a topic and holding discussions about that topic. “Frank the Tank” does have a point when he talks about having a centralized place for discussion as opposed to having to follow it in a bunch of different places. (I’ll have more on these issues and others later, possibly as soon as next week.)

Da Blog doesn’t have much of an audience at all, let alone a “community”, nor does it have any sort of single topic around which a community would form. So, other than ego, why have I long wanted to launch a forum? There are a lot of reasons, but I think a lot of them come back to some of the overarching guiding principles of Da Blog (and MorganWick.com) as a whole. The forum, as I see it, is intended to be a logical extension of Da Blog as a whole, where people willing to think can engage in the sort of in-depth analysis of various topics I try to engage in on Da Blog. One of the purposes I had for Da Blog was as a place where different viewpoints and interests could come together and discover each other, and thus have their horizons broadened. If the two subsites I have now catch on, people who come for my Sports subsite will be able to discover this webcomics thing that’s out there. (Not that they’ll find anything that necessarily appeals to them.)

Like Da Blog itself, the forum is about nothing in particular. No topic is off limits; you can talk about whatever you want to talk about, and I’ve tried to make sure there’s a forum about whatever there is you want to talk about. (There isn’t a Webcomics forum; any webcomics talk can go in the Comics forum.) With the forum, I’ve also tried to create a place for intelligent discussion of whatever topics people are talking about; there is a single Politics forum, and if I ever get the sense that one political persuasion or the other is not welcome there, I’ll split it into Liberal and Conservative forums, but the long-term goal will be to create a place where, as I have often said, liberal and conservative can come together and develop a newfound appreciation for the other persuasion. As such, I’ve tried to make the rules fairly lenient, hoping to encourage frank discussion.

Because of the way bbPress works, the same system powering the forums is also now powering the comment system. That means the following changes to how commenting works, as well as some things you need to know about how the forum works:

• The forum rules also apply to comments. I’ve created a comment policy page that will serve as a brief introduction to the most pertinent rules for anyone who doesn’t go into the forum, but the forum rules will always supercede the comment policy in the event of an apparent conflict. Even so, people who do venture into the forum should check out the comment policy anyway, as it contains important clarifications on how the rules apply to comments.
• There are actual user accounts now, as well as all sorts of cool stuff you associate with forums, like formatting and such. You can also comment the old way, but you won’t be allowed to use all the cool stuff.
• Ding, dong, first-comment approval is dead! Both guests and logged-in users will have their first posts show up right away.

One other thing: I have made the difficult decision (followed by the difficult process) of downgrading WordPress to 3.2.1, whereas earlier I had upgraded it to 3.3.1. This is not something WordPress makes easy to do, as WordPress constantly bugs you about upgrading to the newest version and doesn’t maintain any old versions, but as I’ve said before, when you create something that relies so heavily on plugins you have to make sure those plugins continue to work with new versions or people will be slow to update to those new versions because they want their plugins to continue to work. The first applicable plugin for bbPress I saw in the directory, the plugin to give people formatting controls, doesn’t work with WordPress 3.3, and its proprietor is already showing signs of falling off the face of the earth like the one who ran the plugin that powers the Sports and Webcomics subsites (which also now work properly, and even have more elegant logos as opposed to the old abominations). I don’t know how long I will continue to run an outdated version, but once all the other plugins are updated and I have the time I’ll not only update WordPress but overhaul the entire site and put the subsites on a firmer foundation.

Also, bbPress is kind of kludgy, so the forum will remain under construction for a while as I get used to it, and I can’t guarantee that all the functionality implied in the list above or the forum rules will actually be there (for example, right now you do have to be logged in to post on the forum). Still, I hope that even in this state, the forum will become a place that will raise the IQ of the Internet at least a few points, and that will help the site live up to its “Ideas every day” motto.

(Of course, maybe I’ll run into another reason why “Frank the Tank” shuttered his forum: the potential for it to become a massive time-suck!)

I had heard of SOPA before today’s protests thereof, but I generally don’t like jumping to conclusions and following whatever people tell me I should think. Nonetheless, in light of current events, next week will see a special four-part series on the future of content. Some of this will likely be things that would have made my book on the Internet had I ever written it, and not all of it will be related to SOPA; there will also be things specific to this site’s main two topics, sports and webcomics.

Also, MorganWick.com will go down today sometime between 9 AM and noon PT, but not because of SOPA. I’m finally upgrading to WordPress 3.x series; seems someone finally got around to taking over the plugin that powers the Sports and Webcomics subsites.

Also, as I write this, it is 1:35 AM on the West Coast, and many webcomics have not updated yet, and I still feel confident saying that no other webcomic will protest SOPA as well as Homestuck, even if no one will get it later. (Although now that I’ve seen xkcd, I like its alt text too.)

In preparation for the new series starting later today, there will now be an insane collection of sharing buttons on every post on Da Blog, powered by ShareThis. We have Facebook, we have Twitter, we have MySpace, we have Digg, we have more ways of sharing all the brilliant thoughts on Da Blog than you can shake a stick at. We probably have more than can fit on one line on the screen. Don’t have your favorite obscure social networking site? Let me know and I’ll look to see if I can add it. I want all my bases covered. I want as much of the power of the social network on my side as possible.

Well, and I like the visual of all the social networking icons all in a row with different numbers of shares. Though it would be better if more than just Facebook and Twitter were rendered in their own styles. And if tooltips popped up in case you didn’t recognize a site. (Most sites’ buttons should now have clues to their identity.)

Oh, and I finally got rid of the repeating effect on the header image. It’s weird: on my old laptop, I didn’t see it and I don’t think I thought it was ever going to be an issue, but on my new laptop, which supposedly uses the same resolution, I do.

Call me a wide-eyed idealist, but I believe everyone should be able to make a living doing what they enjoy doing. By which I don’t mean simply “having fun” but whatever their passion is, what they would do if there were no need to make money. If you enjoy making tables and chairs and get a release out of it then maybe you should consider taking up a career in carpentry. This is, in fact, the only reason the Internet has created so much content that’s not directly paid for: people doing what they enjoy doing, people doing what they want to do. There are probably a wide variety of fields that I would be good at, but they wouldn’t be me. I would be working solely to pick up a paycheck. I want to work on what I’m interested in.

I created Da Blog, and later the forerunner to MorganWick.com, in large part to serve as a repository for my work on topics I was fascinated by, out of a hope that enough people would be interested in what I had to say about them to make Da Blog popular and possibly allow me to make some money off it without having to work in some grunt job or something out of a Dilbert cartoon. Once Da Blog was popular, I could use it to push some of my more controversial but profound thinking and build my true greatness. I’ve made several attempts over the years to build Da Blog’s popularity, from the various sports projects to Sandsday to the webcomic reviews to 2008′s October of Politics fiasco.

The webcomic reviews have been the most successful, or should I say least unsuccessful, of the lot… so naturally there may be no part of the site that has suffered more over the past year. One of the top two most popular posts in the history of Da Blog was the 2009 State of Webcomics Address, a post I was reconsidering my thinking on even as I was posting it, only to watch in horror as I was called on to defend views I was no longer sure I held, and given rebuttals I wasn’t sure I didn’t already agree with. One of my biggest regrets is never having posted a clarification to the Address giving a more refined version of my thoughts.

That I haven’t had the work ethic to work on all the posts I’d like to, that I haven’t been as fast or as committed as I’d like to be, has always been a problem of mine hindering Da Blog, but my time has also been restricted by the need to work on schoolwork. I’ve always attempted to juggle schoolwork and Da Blog, with a sensitivity towards the time-sensitivity of much of what I work on on Da Blog, and a desire to build upon what little I have. Honestly, my work on Da Blog has wound up having the impact of limiting the amount of schoolwork that gets done, and I wind up prioritizing the assignments that seem to me to be really important.

Everything started spiralling downhill last summer of 2009, when I took a summer class. Under normal circumstances, at my school most people take three classes at a time; as it happened, through a series of events early in my college career I was led to the conclusion that I was best off taking two classes at a time. But summer classes are very condensed and designed to be taken one class at a time, meaning for about a month, my schedule was equivalent to taking three classes at a time. The resulting time crunch was such that I decided to abandon following my RSS feeds (except for Order of the Stick).

A month may not seem like much to catch up on, but even before all this, my RSS feeds took so long to catch up on that I had to spend a significant portion of every single (week)day catching up on them. Combine this with the fact I wasn’t quite done with the work the course required, and while I made a fairly sizeable dent in catching up on my RSS feeds by the time regular classes started up again, it was far from complete.

Due to procrastination on my part, I was signed up for only one class when classes started up again instead of two, but fall is typically one of the busiest periods of the year for Da Blog because of all the football stuff, and my progress on my RSS feeds, slowed by the launch of the new site, had been derailed by my decision to commense an OOTS archive binge that, because of a related associated project, turned out to take far, far longer than I ever anticipated. Then, right as I finally finished the work for the summer class, the screen of my laptop broke, and it took at least a month before I finally got a new one, which hamstrung the work on the football projects and halted the archive binge, since I was having a hard enough time working on the work for my one class without a laptop. I still haven’t caught up on more than one feed since then.

The Christmas break was utterly unproductive, so I was still behind on the OOTS archive binge. That project wound up dominating my time for a good chunk of February, and in the meantime an old enemy flared up again. Despite writing some occasionally angry posts over the course of 2009, I had, in fact, figured that I had mostly shaken my old tendency to flare up in angry outbursts that got me into trouble and kicked out of classes. But one result of that was that I stopped seeing my therapist, and didn’t start up again even as the stress of not being able to keep up on my RSS feeds and the OOTS archive binge started getting to me.

So the end result was, I wound up kicked out of a class. Then, right as the quarter was ending, I had another outburst that would have gotten me kicked out of the other class if the quarter wasn’t ending. And at that point I was given an ultimatum: If you want to stay at Seattle University, you better make damn sure this crap never happens again. Otherwise you can go off to some online school for all we care.

For over a week I thought about it. On the one hand, leaving Seattle University would mean going all-in on Da Blog and hoping it works out, when it hasn’t worked out yet. But on the other hand, the requirements for staying at school – the steps needed to take to reduce the chances for another incident to as close to zero as possible – would involve strictly keeping up with the assignments and not falling behind on them at all, lest the stress of having to catch up cause problems, and to maintain that pace would require me to virtually abandon Da Blog for the two-plus years it would take to complete my degree.

I did eventually decide not to take the quitter’s way out, and I’m still going to Seattle University for the foreseeable future. But that means I can’t really juggle Da Blog and my schoolwork the way I used to while trying to get ahead with Da Blog anymore. I intended to use the summer as a way to wrap up a few projects of mine (as well as more schoolwork I didn’t get done during the actual school year) while making a last-ditch effort to make Da Blog popular enough to support itself, but thanks to TV Tropes and some other distractions, I wound up doing virtually none of that. Honestly, I don’t think that, at least in my case, colleges do a good enough job of reflecting and supporting their students’ true passions, instead boxing them in to a certain mode of living and learning.

Over the next couple of weeks I do intend to get one of my projects out of the way, an attempted reprise of the October of Politics with lessons learned from the past, but after that – unless it catches on – expect posting frequency to drop precipitously, and for the paucity of posts seen over the past year to become the norm. I’ll still get out a new State of Webcomics Address containing the aforementioned clarification of my views, and even finally catch up on my RSS feeds. But I’m probably not going to test the Line of Sight rankings this year, and once my desktop gets fixed I’m probably going to adopt the 2007 solution of posting only the RTFs of the regular College Football Rankings, at least for this year. Beyond that webcomics posts are probably going to be restricted to the summer only if at all, and summer in general should see the greater portion of the posts for the year over the next two years.

I’m not shutting down posting on Da Blog entirely, but if this new project doesn’t work out I think it’s very possible I may be back to square one in terms of finding something to do with my future. I need to find something that won’t grind down my soul, something that will properly use my abilities and that I’ll be able to enjoy at least a little (I need to find a word between “enjoy” and “tolerate”). Da Blog seemed like the best approach for my affinities, and I may now be back to Plan B, and the road ahead seems downright murky.

Twitter has opened things up for anyone to “build a better Twitter”. I’m not really sure what the point is – either Twitter’s admitting their site sucks or it works just fine and there’s no need to use something else…
-From the introduction to Da Tweeter.

I didn’t get any of my proposed book on the Internet written over the summer, and quite possibly never will. Already on the way out, the kairotic moment for the book may now have passed. This is partly because the Internet has substantially matured; for much of the time I was thinking of writing the book, it would have been trivially easy to state the Internet’s importance (and often stated), but now the book would be much more of a look back than taking place during the Internet revolution and how it changes our lives. I had planned for the book’s subtitle to be How the Internet Changes Everything; now it might be How the Internet Changed Everything.

But also, many of the points I would have made may now be shifting substantially. I had an entire chapter planned dedicated to showing how the free nature of the Internet could threaten the foundation of capitalism, at least for the transmission of information, including an analysis of Marxist theory as applied to the Internet. (I’m not a communist, but communism may do a better job than capitalism of describing what happens on the Internet.) But if the recent provocative cover story of Wired is correct (and it’s been skewered to hell and back by the blogosphere), the free Web may be in decline in favor of the non-free world of apps accessing the broader Internet, in which case capitalism is completely safe and the first decade of the new millenium will soon pass into history as the Decade of the Fad of Free.

Again, most of Chris Anderson’s points have been debunked by the (admittedly Web-based) blogosphere, but there is a salient point to be explored behind the rhetoric. In retrospect, the 2007 debut of the iPhone may mark the beginning of, if not Web 3.0, at least Web 2.5. The iPhone introduced an alternative model to the free exchange of information that grew out of the web and social media sites. Even netbooks had browser software separate from whatever operating system they ran that handled all your surfing; the iPhone effectively merged the browser and operating system to such an extent it was conceivably possible to be very active on the Internet without entering the actual Web browser. The iPhone made each site its own distinct identity, its own program, stored on the phone itself rather than repeatedly loaded from the server, to present its information and capabilities however it wished without conforming to the Web’s standards, permissive though they may be.

When I first joined Twitter, I expressed skepticism about the usefulness of programs such as TweetDeck for connecting to Twitter, thinking them redundant to the site itself. Virtually the instant problems with IE8 drove me to Firefox, I set about trying to use an add-on to post to and use Twitter. I don’t believe I have found the right FF add-on – TwitterBar, the most popular add-on, only allows you to post to Twitter from the address bar (not check Twitter messages), and the two Twitter add-ons I’ve actually installed, Friendbar and Lu.ly, have unnecessary animations and graphical complexity that bog the browser down. (Friendbar tells me of a new message by playing a chime and reversing the colors – reasonable – and then engages in a fade effect back to normal colors I can’t turn off.) I haven’t used FF in months because I’m waiting for it to get back to an acceptable speed for the level of Internet usage I engage in, and I refuse to install betas.

I didn’t run off to add-ons like Friendbar because of any problem with the Twitter site. The Twitter site works just fine, though “infinite scrolling” is a welcome innovation in new Twitter. But I don’t want to have to leave a tab on Twitter all the time, where it’s not visible all the time, or constantly press the Twitter button in my Favorites bar to load up Twitter off the Internet hogging up space on my tabs. I want to be able to keep up with people’s tweets in real time, whenever I want to, at the click of a button at most, and I want instant ability to post to Twitter any time, whenever it strikes the mood. I don’t want to have to pull up Google Reader on one of my tabs; I want to quickly pull up a sidebar and see all my RSS feeds’ current status, like Internet Explorer and Firefox’s Feed Sidebar add-on let me do, or even see all the RSS feed updates I want to see without even lifting a finger. (I still don’t understand why an SMS-equipped smartphone needs a separate app to access Twitter – I must be the last Twitter user to actually txt the site – and apparently, Twitter didn’t either.)

There are some Web sites and some elements of the Internet that are, quite simply, bigger than the browser. They may or may not appropriate the Web for their experience, and they may even be heavily connected to and be dedicated to bringing you the Web, but they are broader than the Web, they are not inherently part of the Web, they only connect to the broader network known as the Internet. So I think a lot of the bloggers who are saying “silly rabbit, Facebook and Twitter are web sites!” may be missing a point that Wired admittedly doesn’t really make. If they stopped being Web sites tomorrow, it might be a sea change, but it wouldn’t be a catastrophe. There’s now a war going on between the Web’s ideals of openness – epitomized by HTML5 – and the return of walled gardens.

So much as I might have once thought otherwise, I don’t think the rollout of “new Twitter” – introduced in a blogpost literally titled, “A Better Twitter” – will necessarily bring people back to the site from other apps. In fact, Twitter is jumping aboard a long bandwagon away from the paradigm of hypertext, and towards a paradigm of getting as much as possible out of every individual page, thus robbing the Web of its critical feature. Changing the URL on the address bar is more useful for direct links than once you’re already at the site; the less you need to use the back button, the better. (“Google Instant” is another sign of this paradigm shift, and that’s a site inextricably linked with the Web.)

Beyond that, the new Twitter is more of a cosmetic change than anything else (a cosmetic change my netbook might be a little slow to properly appreciate), though certainly not a bad one. Even a fairly basic change in functionality that might have accompanied it – tweets updating in close to real time instead of just an alert that they exist – isn’t there (in fact tweet lists seem slow or at least difficult to refresh in general). Twitter was out to add one feature: added functionality to the pages for individual tweets.

One aspect in particular – the ability to follow a conversation from a single page – could almost finish off the old retweet system. The major strike against the new Twitter-backed system was the inability to add your own commentary to tweets, and using this new forum-like aspect of replies, you could make your retweet a reply that people can click and see the tweet responded to… except a) you still have to make it an @reply to make it a reply to a tweet, despite the addition of an interface that could conceivably make that unnecessary and b) there is no way to make sure followers see your tweet if they don’t follow the person you’re responding to. In general, Twitter seems to have missed the broader implications of some of the changes they made; other media, like images and videos, are displayed directly on the tweet pane now, obviating the need for a link and indicating Twitter realizes such things are core to Twitter’s being now and bigger than the tweets themselves (and Twitter for iPad applies this to an even broader extent), but all links still count against the 140 characters (and aren’t very useful in text messages), keeping link shortening services like bit.ly in business.

New Twitter isn’t ultimately much of a big deal, though it certainly is welcome. But it doesn’t really enter into a lot of larger issues Twitter finds itself in the thick of. And even as Twitter shores up the front of the free Web, it does so by making the Web more app-like. Time will tell how this battle shakes out, or how Twitter continues to evolve the service.

I didn’t want to start biasing the results by marking the stuff I liked, but the RID has so far fallen well short of the grandiose vision I had for it. Maybe I’ll just thumbs-down crap like this so I don’t get directed to it anymore. I’m not starting a Da Blog Poll on the issue yet, but I may soon.

(Besides, that promise was for more serious fare anyway.)