6 posts tagged “six apart”
The above graphic represents the sound waves in the phone call I had with Kristen, our Vox World Tour winner (the prize was a trip to San Francisco, Tokyo and Paris -- the cities where we developed Vox.)
If you haven't checked out the video/audio of Kristen finding out that she had won, be sure to have a listen. I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to deliver the news and to have such a tangible relic of someone's happiness.
Being in Las Vegas for CES and making the Nokia announcement (oh yeah, and iPhone too) made me realize how far we've come with camera phones and moblogging in such a short amount of time. Take the photos below, for example. These were taken on my Danger Hiptop in June of 2003 (I can't believe that's almost four years ago!). Yes, those are full resolution -- they were that small! See all the photos here.
At the time, I felt that I was *late* to the moblogging boom [1] since I had previously been a bit 'meh' about it all. From the SXSW Tech Report interview I did in 2002(!) [2]. My reaction now in bold italics.
How much of an impact will new wireless devices such as the Danger Hiptop (The T-Mobile Sidekick) have on the blogging community? Do you ever blog via a PDA?
Nobody wants to see blogging just for the sake of blogging (Yes they do.). But, I do believe that some of these tools will initially produce this result. Still, the technology of wireless devices is the next logical step if we ever want to see webloggers as journalists -- or at least as informed observers (OMG, shut-up). For developers, these devices will certainly influence the way we design sites and manage our content (true, ask the Vox team); we're going to see a demand for standards-compliant code as soon as these devices reach mass appeal (True, but how much do I hate the phrase standards-compliant?). Do I ever blog via a PDA? I still use the 7 inch long emergency cell-phone that AAA offered its users (I bought the Hiptop a couple months later).
Well, I love blogging for the sake of blogging. And I'm just amazed by how much easier moblogging has become. But more importantly, the quality of photos is getting to be amazing. Take for example, a photo that was on my phone, having been taken with the Nokia N93i for their demos:
Sure, professional lighting helps. But it's still possible for us to take unstaged photos that look like this:
[1] I love that I used to write about getting a phone on Six Apart's official weblog. I also love that people TrackBacked their posts about me getting a phone.
[2] The funny thing about this interview is how much I'm fighting my real voice to appeal to the SXSW crowd circa 2002. I mean, seriously, it's not hard to tell which question in this interview Anil helped to supply an answer. Hint: think microcontent. (This isn't a dig at Anil -- it's just not an answer I'd give) One of the best things about my time at Six Apart is learning how to be comfortable being in my own skin. I love giving the big picture (where will blogging be in x years) now because I go from gut and the passion I feel about about technology and blogging (and I avoid using the phrase 'semantic web'). And I'll sound completely random from time to time in press, but at least I'm being myself.
Six Apart doesn't let the holiday season interfere with innovation. In fact, the holidays make us realize how far we must go to get moms, dads, brothers, sisters and grandparents into our wonderful blogging world. To make this a reality, Six Apart is introducing Blogs by Phone (beta).
You can tell that Anil led this video endeavor by his ability to insert himself doing the Thriller dance. Very good work Anil and those who helped: Mike, Jane, Marissa, Anil, Harold, Rachel, Sippey, Kimberly, Ginger, Luke, Keri, Tatsuhiko, Krissy, Steve. Love the fact that it's pretty effortless for us to pull an equal number of men to women for this video.
I realized that when I did this question, I'd have to share with the world how messy my office is. I think I picked this question today so that I'd actually have the motivation to clean it up. Perhaps later today.
Inspired by David's video tour of his own office, I present a movie of my office.
I associate product releases with musical albums. Mostly because when I'm working on a product -- and especially during crunch times -- I will often play an album on loop for days on end. With Movable Type, the soundtrack was Melody Nelson and Jane Birkin et Serge Gainsbourg. With TypePad, it was Elephant by the White Stripes (I broke up my problems into little parts just like that little squirrel). With Vox, the last couple weeks have been Nouvelle Vague's self-titled 80s covers album. The reason I bring all this up is because there's one song that is playing on loop in my mind: This is Not a Love Song, a cover of the PiL classic. It's got lyrics like: "Not television / Behind the curtain / Out of the cupboard / You take the first train / Into the big world" and "Big business is very wise" (that's my loving nickname for a certain CEO of mine). It's the perfect song for today. Not only because the lyrics can apply to us right now, but because I keep on reminding myself that as far as we're concerned "this is not a launch."
This is not
a launch. Vox is not feature complete. Six Apart and the Vox team are
still working hard on the product, and we know we're got even farther
to go. Think of this stage -- we're calling it a preview release -- as
more of a groundbreaking, lifting the veil away from something we've
been working on, for, well, a really long time. We're growing Vox
slowly, by letting people in gradually through invitations and building
a strong network of people. We're doing it this way to sure that the
infrastructure scales. And we're doing it this way to make sure we get
it right.
Many of the best aspects of weblogs and blogging software came about from the community helping refine the way things work. With Vox, we want to make that community feedback an explicit part of the development process. The team has learned that the more people that are in the service, the more we can learn how it should behave. Vox is part of something much larger -- a desire to try understand how people will want to blog in the future, even if they aren't blogging right now. And just like there was no official "start date," there is no official end date, but we are planning the official launch a few months out.
What does this mean for our other products?
Vox represents the first product that we've built on a platform that we call Meteor. The infrastructure is being applied to our existing products. Much of the backend infrastructure that powers Vox originated with LiveJournal and powers other massive sites like the Wikipedia and Slashdot. All our products share common APIs and leading up to the official launch we are working on integration projects that leverage each of our products core strengths. Vox is about introducing a whole new group of users to blogging as well as supplementing existing blogging platforms.
My roots are in personal blogging.
My first blog, dollarshort.org was all about my personal life: my childhood, my family, my daily interactions, etc... I loved blogging on dollarshort because I could tell stories. I wrote about my parents inventing a fake brother for me. I made up silly infographics. I wrote about my first boyfriend and my nightmare summer camp experience. I even podcasted in 2001! I could track my life and interact with people in a living room of sorts. And I found it increasingly difficult to write about my personal life with the same freedom and intimacy. I wrote all these difficulties in my my banjo post from July, 2004. It was then that I realized that having a public blog and a public persona and keeping the intimacy that made personal blogging fun was an incredibly difficult balancing act.
In the past couple months, as I've used Vox, I've started to feel like I did in 2001 when I first started dollarshort. The majority of my posts are "friends and family" and document my day. I write about my dog, Maddy, who we just adopted from a rescue foundation. I write about trips I go on and experiences I have. Most importantly, I write these posts for people who care about me and want to share their lives too. I haven't had to worry about who I might offend or some nasty comment that's will creep up. In short, personal blogging is really really fun again.
I don't think it's unfair for me to say that the "blogosphere" is often a hostile place. I said it in Paris and, although the speech is remembered more for the little blow up at the end, I stand by my statement that bringing new people to blogging is a good thing and unless we have a space where people can feel that they aren't going to get attacked, we will fail as an industry. People will debate whether the internet can be "nice." I'm still not asking for nice -- I'm asking for the acceptance of the same social norms we have in the offline world.
But back to Vox. Vox is about what makes us who we are; it about our lives, what we read, what we see, what we listen to and most importantly, who we choose to share it with. It's about having the option to write a post to reach thousands of people or two people. Since March, I've written about 60 posts on this blog. Most people will only see a fraction of that. And that's okay.
Actually, it's definitely more than okay, it's awesome. And, it's what
most people are used to. Sometimes you only want your five best friends
in the world to see a post, and you should be able to do that.
I'm really excited and proud of Vox. I'm proud of the team and Six Apart. This release represents a young product and we have a lot of
growing to do. But, as far as the feeling of community we envisioned,
we feel we got it right.
