SvN blog: Highly regarded soapbox

10 Oct 2005

Jason Freid, of 37Signals, writes of what he spoke at the recent Web 2.0 conference (Is it possible to not look at that name and anticipate it will be derided and ridiculed in five, ten years time, as much as we now look at the pre-dot com burst and shudder/giggle?) on their weblog, Signal vs Noise.

No sketches first, no studies, that’s long past:
I do what many dream of, all their lives,
— Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
Who strive–you don’t know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat, —
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,
(I know his name, no matter)—so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.

Less is more in web application development, apparently, and so we are judged: more successful yet strangely lesser in several ways to make this so. Whether or not you agree with this is irrelevant. In what may just be the best weblog comment of the year, Jason succinctly (yet rather eloquently) issues a rebuttal to a commenter who complains of the appropriateness of 37Signals issuing directives on what does and doesn’t work.

“But what position are 37signals in to make these statements? What you do, works for you.”

We have a blog.</p>

I was wondering how long it would take the Internet to realise this. ‘A-list’ digerati or not, any website assuming that form (i.e. a blog) remains, at its core, a personal publishing platform. Or soapbox. Or… whatever. You can give it corporate gloss, if that’s your thing, but the content is (read: should be, by the directive I am now issuing as to what this does and does not entail, because I have a blog, you are reading it, and therefore I will say what should and should not be, damn it!) intrinsically and at its essence of a personal nature. This can mean a variety of things to different people in different contexts, but I think the most important (and unescapable) facet of this is the importance of opinion and the fact that much blogging content is simply that.

Disclaimer: I think I’m morally opposed to meta-blog posts, but they have to happen once in a while… and I try and contain myself to simply responding to stuff that’s happened elsewhere. Feel free to get angry with me in the comments.

p.s. Please excuse my appalling markup in this post. WordPress was being a cow and not letting me nest blockquotes (it mightn’t be valid, anyway, but it would have been semantically appropriate so I don’t particularly care even if it wasn’t), and I’m tired and Alex King’s WP Unformatted plugin doesn’t seem to be working. *cries self to sleep over bad markup* ;-)