10:18, 11/07/2008

No comment

I remember two years or so ago, beginning an ongoing discussion with my good friend Siobhan Curran over the merits of the exceptional hacked together hand rolled blogging software that enables her website, Tranniefesto. Meeting her last night, as we occasionally do when she's down in London, reminded me of that conversation.

I continue to be particularly enthused by the way that the commenting system was designed in such a way as to create a natural flow of "conversation", which would play out daily then be quietly rolled over onto the next day, just like we live our lives. This struck me as not just rather clever but exactly how blogging should be. Very little I've seen before or since has come close to matching the elegance of the experience that Siobhan managed to create there.

SInce we started talking about the mechanics of blogging, audiences, conversations, all centred round the excellence of the Tranniefesto engine, blogs have come and gone. Tranniefesto itself is on indefinite hiatus while Siobhan waits to discover the next paradigm, and write that all important final post which will close one door and open the next. This very website closed down for a few hundred days before reopening recently. Other excellent sites from our community have similarly waned and waxed.

So I'm back, but you'll notice there is no commenting system on the new draGnet.

This cuts to the core of the conversations I had with Siobhan. Her website was all about dialogue. Hers was a community of readers with whom she was having an endless 24/7/365 conversation. In very real terms, the audience was part of the creative team behind tranniefesto. If that sounds exhausting, well, it bloody is. Collaboration is a difficult discipline and can lead to wonderful results, but managing chaos (or the potential for chaos) is long winded and tiresome. Really, that's one of the reasons why I admired Tranniefesto so much. It provided a UI and an information architecture that channeled the almost certain chaos of an indefinite number of contributors all talking at once, into a user experience that was intelligible at first signt and could be administered by just one (albeit often very stressed) person.

Siobhan was often somewhat frustrated by that way that her community would misinterpret, hijack or otherwise derail conversations she initiated. But I'd say that on the whole the effort was more than worthwhile and made Tranniefesto into a fascinating place to visit and revisit. Yes, even when she was blogging about code.

So, why no comments and conversations here? I thought long and hard about this when I redesigned my website. I contemplated going away from the journalling format entirely and having a site that didn't use blogging software as the content management system. See, my needs are very different to those of Siobhan and Tranniefesto. I realised that (apart from plugging the band) I was very much using draGnet as a creative outliner. Somewhere to commit the products of my various creative impulses so that they were done and out and I could forget about them and move on.

So while the comments of my readers were valuable, I began to realise that the feedback and the sense of audience that it gave me were distracting me from the impulse to create and get my creations out there. So this is why I've organised my new site along the lines you see here. It's stil using the blogging (or rather journaling) paradigm as I want it to be a sequential record of my creative output. But really all I'm doing is having a conversation with myself. If that sounds solipsistic, I'm sorry. I of course continue to value highly the participation of each and everyone who comes and reads my words, looks at my pictures and listens to my noises. It's just that I don't need the artifacts of audience participation to be available to me at all times.

(Notwithstanding, I'd value individual contact from anyone who has things to say to me about what they read here. The contact link's at the bottom.)

Intrestingly, a couple of Siobhan's other personae are now regularly blogging elsewhere. Guess what? No comments.

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