Submitted by johnh on April 30, 2007 - 14:00.
I'm only bringing this up because it's relevant to what follows, but I maintain that Twitter still sucks (it was down all night again last night, by the way and its user-hostile and flaky nature just bit another respected ex-colleague).
That said, and moving right along to the real point of this post, there's a lot to be said for the idea that maintaining a blog could be simpler. Today I'm going to share with you the real reason I don't post here as often as I should.
It's because I post elsewhere. Some years ago I unilaterally that evolt.org's predominantly-social IRC channel could do with its own blog. That decision was based predominantly on having tech-envy of two illustrious predecessors: The Daily Chump, powered by a Python bot penned by its members; but above all 2lmc's spool. 2lmc was once a house in Islington containing several twentysomething perl programmers (including my former business partner who's now doing something complicated at Flickr). The spool, then, was partly software written by people I know -- but mostly it was also a very funny blog written by people I know (it's very much less active these days since the house was scattered to the four corners of the tech universe).
Unable to source the code at the time to run 2lmc's bot, I settled on the Chumps' engine. And so spool.evolt.org was born.
Someone posts a link, and it either sits there for others to follow at their leisure, or the rest of the group leaves comments on it. These could be more related links, dumb pictures, or (most usually) snark. (Apparently the kids are calling this a 'tumblelog' now because they don't know it's been around forever and -- at the risk of reigniting a debate with James yet again, it seems everything has to be invented all over again indefinitely by the less-geeky ones who didn't see it the first time.)
So?
This format's bluddy grate. It's social (it's written by everyone in the group or any ad-hoc subset thereof). It's quick and dirty, like all good tech is. But -- and here's the Twitter reference -- it's insanely easy to write. I can make a new post by copy-and-pasting something off my browser's address bar and pressing Enter.
Compare that to writing this. I need to attempt to cram everything into some sort of logical order despite sleep deprivation, after logging in and typing it all into a web form, then checking and unchecking a bunch of stuff and submitting and rechecking. And then editing out the inevitable typo or three. Blogging software these days is great as a simple content management system. But for actual blogging, for throwing a bunch of stuff up or covering something in real time? These IRC things are so much better.
Finally the promised election reference
In 2005 I was running a then-rather-well-known political blog before and during the UK general election campaign. In the last week I set up a second blog to cover as-it-happens election news and invited the world and her dog to join in on election night.
The channel was packed on election night, and twenty or more people were posting results in real time as they arrived for the sixty-odd people in IRC and another several thousand hitting Refresh watching the IRC blog on the web.
In other words, it's been tested in action during an election and it was a) successful and b) inclusive, but most of all c) great fun.
So here's today's new project: KildareStreet.com. News and commentary as it's posted elsewhere, sifted by whichever group of people ends up coalescing around it. Plus as much snark as you like because, let's face it, no matter how much heat is generated in the next 23 days we can be pretty sure there won't be any light.
Come on down and try it for yourself. #kildarestreet on Freenode.net -- the IRC bot doing all the work has been christened 'ceanncomhairle'.
After the election I imagine I'll keep it going to cover whatever comes next, but right now I've got no idea how it'll turn out. More interesting that way.