Blogging is stupid

The best metaphor I can think of for a web site is the garden, because my vision of a perfect garden, at least, has a lot in common with what I think is a perfect web site. The perfect garden is not focused on a single element such as a lawn, flower bed, water feature, or garden furniture. A garden would be pretty dull if it was nought but a giant lawn, or a minefield of flowerbeds you can't walk on, or an auditorium of garden benches. So different features are mixed together to produce a garden with nice things to look at, a place to do things, and a place to sit and enjoy it all. The perfect garden is also maintained by a process of repair and improvement and adaptation to the seasons.

All of these are good metaphors for the construction and care of the perfect web site.

Things To Look At

You begin with flowerbeds and shrubs. Then you plant trees, or maybe there's already some grand trees that you plan the garden around. You add sculptures and rocks and now you're starting to have something to look at. These have an obvious parallel to your visual design and the illustrations or photos you supplement text with on a web site. And on a web site, like in a garden, variety of kind pays.

That means if you can use diagrams, charts and maps as well as photos and illustrations, even better. Some of these things haven't been easy to do in the past (like maps), but are getting easier. When you write about an event that took place somewhere in the world, wouldn't it be nice if you could make a map of that little corner of the globe and highlight what part you're talking about?

Things That Set The Mood

The sound of trickling, splashing water is hypnotic on a warm evening, especially if your water feature drains into a pool lit by submersible lighting and stocked with koi and goldfish. These are "Things To Look At" as well, and when you combine them with flowerbeds, sculpture and trimming your garden starts to acquire a unique character, with citizens of rock and earth and flora.

The analogy to these in the web site world is a bit subtle: it's the theme and plan you have for the site. Knowing your site's theme and plan will help you chose the right design elements, tone of prose and content matter that, together, set the mood. In a garden you can chose plastic flamingos and gnomes, or greek statuettes and stone fountain bowls, or weeping willows and wooden benches. As long as you stick to the theme, anything is appropriate.

Places To Do Things

A perfect garden should have a lawn big enough to play an impromptu game of baseball or Bocce Ball and to put up tents and tables for an outdoor party, or a wedding reception, or a graduation. This is event space, and on a web site we can approximate it with the blog and the Wiki sandbox idea, which afford different ways of dealing with unplanned content.

Supplementing event space are permanent fixtures that support a specific activity, such as mini-golf courses, basketball hoops, horseshoe pits, sandboxes, children's Jungle Jims, trampolines, hot-tubs, and a swimming pools.

On a web site, there are now a large number of interactive features that are reasonably easy to add with third party software. Things like shared calendars, web mail, photo slideshows and games.

Some are custom built. I once saw a brilliant and original idea done on an art gallery web site; a kind of web Easter Egg hunt and trading game fashioned after the Beanie Baby craze. Artist members created the "beanies"--which were just thumbnail sized images--and people who browsed the web site after creating an account and logging-in would find them randomly scattered around the site. The implementation was actually to randomly chose a "beanie" and put it on a page at random times, having some beanies more common than others. Visitors would start to build a collection of these virtual beanies, and as they grew, a trading system was added for members to swap their finds with each other and acquire the rare ones.

I've never seen anything like it since, but it transformed the experience of visiting the site.

Places To Sit And Enjoy It All

Gardens need benches and gazeebos where people gather and chat, and web sites need places for visitors to discuss the content of the site. Human discourse is fundamentally topicless, and one of the big problems with blogs is the idea of attaching comments to blog posts as if conversation was somehow containable within the scope of what the blog post was about.

What happens in nature and human thought is mad diversification. This is fantastic stuff, and should be encouraged. The problem of building computerized forums for discussion is mostly solved, and as it pertains to a web site it means the activity of discussing a thing should never be married to that thing. A good Forum or Bulletin Board System on a web site makes it easy to link to the formal publications from within forum postings, and vice versa. That means individual forum posts should be easily linkable, and search result pages should be easily represented with URLs.

Instead of sticking a "comments" thread on the bottom of individual pages, there should be a link to a search results page in the forum system that brings together postings which discuss the content, regardless of which discussion thread they're found in. People who go to the forum to chime in should be able to hit on multiple topics within each post, and those posts should be able to live independently of the pages that inspired them, inspiring more posts, until the discussion has wandered to wherever it has to go.

Repair And Improvement

A good gardener plants flowers that bloom at different points during the season, erects a greenhouse to shelter and nuture fragile plants in cooler months, puts out heated birdbaths and suet cakes in the winter, and can organize an Easter Egg hunt in the spring.

A gardener also mends broken fences, digs out the weeds, mows the lawn and spreads fertilizer.

And a gardener plans for the occasional change of scenery. Plants new trees, moves furniture to explore the possibilities of a shadier/sunnier spot, even tears down, re-designs and re-plants entire flowerbeds. He finds new sculptures to add to or replace old ones. He builds a ramp to the door when someone in the house is confined to a wheelchair.

A web site doesn't have to be chained to nature's seasons, but it should change over time. The growth of content may soon demand a new categorization system. Progress in web technologies may make a new feature possible and practical. Spam will need to be weeded, typos fixed, errata published and corrections made, maybe even entire pages deleted when they're no longer relevant.

The "seasons" of a web site might follow the seasons of a sport it covers, or of a country's election cycle, or of the phases in a project it tracks. Some features of the site such as its unplanned content area (blog, wiki sandbox, discussion forum) may feature more prominently in one season than it does in another.

A site tracking the election cycle, for example, may bring its blog element to dominate the front page in the weeks and hours before the election, when rapid news demands an unstructured and time-driven tool. When the election is over, the blog is reduced to a link in the sidebar while its position on the front page is replaced with essays that analyze the outcome. A month or so after the election, during the slow days of campaigns that haven't even come together yet, the web site can turn over the front page to the discussion forum where members talk about their plans for the next election still years away.

The Blog Is Not Mother, The Blog Is Not Father

A million non-commercial web sites have been born since the blog craze began. Almost as many have been abandonned to the weeds as their creators gave them up and went back to having a life untainted by the need to update. Almost all of those web sites were blog, and only blog. Like a garden with no features except a big lawn covered spasticly by plastic flamingos and plaster gnomes. Blog-only web sites are the trailer trash of the web.

But there are now web site hosts and software packages that make it easy to mix together different elements. The place I'm writing this at now, Infogami, is such a place. It's still evolving, it seems, and I don't really know what the intentions of its creator are, but it affords not only easy construction of static pages, but also a handful of common web site elements like blogs and comment tails. It may soon offer more, like maybe a good unbounded discussion forum and a search engine (if the designer is paying any attention to me).

last updated 3 years ago #