Refreshing creativity discussions from the dynamic and “writeable Web”

Just some thoughts sparked by an email from my brother…

My brother, Bill, sent me this link to a Tim Bray interview on SYS-CON.TV. It is, in it’s own way, a discussion about creativity and the new opportunities online today. The link is to a video interview with Sun’s Tim Bray from SYS-CON.TV on May. 27, 2006. It has “Reads (of) 5,842″ recorded on the site, yet I searched for commentary about it in Technorati and Blogpulse and found no links. That surprised me. Hmm? Well, no matter - the video is worth the time to watch.

I’ll admit it is a repeat of much that many have said before, but - for a developer / programmer of Bray’s stature to make these comments - well, it is refreshing. Yes, it does have a whiff of “Cluetrain” in it, but Bray doesn’t seem to have any Koolaid on his lips. Most enjoyable is how Bray and Geelan talk about “building bridges” and other PR sentiments.

Interestingly, Lee Hopkins and Allan Jenkins are talking about Web 2.0 and creativity online, too. A similarity exists between these two conversations - Bray’s interview and Lee and Allan’s podcast. Both are talking about the creativity opportunities that are enabled by a read-write Web which also offers audio and video and more.

Lee refers to Presentation Zen, a terrific site about design and presentation in business from Garr Reynolds. Allan talks about the dreaded term - Web 2.0. Allan doesn’t believe there has been a dramatic shift online because, as he says, Allan is still using the Web for interacting with others. He refers to new tools - podcasts, vlogs - as adapting an existing medium with new tools (PodPress plugin for Wordpress, for example) to continue interacting with others.

Bray, it turns out, is not a fan of the terms “Web 2.0″ and “content” - so, Bray keeps it real. Bray notes that the web is “a dozen years old” and the future does look positive because there is a common theme - “the internet turned from a few to many, to a many to many” form. Then Bray gives credit to his Manager Hal Stearn, Sun’s CTO, for the “writable web” term. If you want to take it down to true simplicity, that’s what finally made it work.

I don’t like the term Web 2.0 because it is (a) really just a reference to new versions of software and scripts while (b) not truly addressing the realities of new communication activity online. It has also been so overused that it now even has negative connotations as just - buzz nonsense. Note, I did not say new communication forms online. All this social media is really, to me, is just the use of new tools - or adapted, feature rich tools - to do the same thing we’ve always been doing - communicating. So, I agree with Allan’s thoughts in his podcast.

The tools have simply made it easier and faster. The tools have also, because of opensource - primarily, made it more available to the masses. But, we still have a ways to go. Note that all of the people I’m referring to in this video (Bray) and podcast (Hopkins and Jenkins), as well as myself, are all middle aged white guys and rather white-collar, at that. Certainly many others from widely diverse socio-economic sectors are also engaging in the activity, but adoption by business and educational institutions is still a small percentage of the potential audience.

One aspect of these “Web 2.0″ and “social media” discussions that always makes me smile is the idea that a “writeable web” is somehow new. It isn’t. In fact, a read/write Web was actually built into the tools at its very inception.

The interactive web has existed since Tim Berners-Lee created the first browser - WorldWideWeb, later called Nexus. It was a read/write tool. The tool - that particular tool - just didn’t catch on as fast as the code - HTML. Browsers, of course, became quite popular but they were initially Mosaic and Netscape. It was later when Internet Explorer came along, and even moreso when opensource started springing up everywhere that PHP/MySQL and other languages allowed for more people to do this online dialog thing with so much more ease. And, here is the cool part, you really didn’t need to be a coder or developer to use those tools.

Now, I will say that these new tools do offer more opportunities for creativity online. Twelve years ago, would students of mine - PR students, mind you - have been doing “social media” internships? Of course not.

Yet, today at Camp ASCCA, two students - Katie Irwin and Danielle Lee - are doing what is likely the first large nonprofit organization social media site with video, podcasts, Flickr photos and more. Why can they do it now? Because it is so easily available, so inexpensive to do and some of it is as easy as filling in an email form. I know, I’m being a bit simplisitic, but the bar for creating online published material has been lowered immensly.

Think of just two powerful and popular opensource offerings - Wordpress and Audacity - and the built-in moviemaker on PCs. Now, combine that with the availability of $500 computers and even less expensive digital photo cameras, video and audio reorders - and moblogging cellphones with cameras that most every students seems to have now - and you get a revolutionary volume of activity. Some might even call it an evolutionary volume of activity - all due to the availability of these new tools.

Erin Caldwell was recently hired by Edelman not only because she’s smart - but also due to her web activity and creativity. Maggie Landry and Paige Bagby wouldn’t be working in Washington, DC and blogging or educating co-workers about the possibilities of online conversations. Darien McCloskey wouldn’t be working at a local advertising/marketing firm and encouraging them to blog. There are more examples, but those speak loudly to me. The availabilty of the tools made this possible. They could be exposed to the tools, and how to use them in PR activities, without needing to be a software engineer.

So, yes Allan and Lee - we are just doing the same thing with new tools, or variations of old tools. But, I do think it has opened up possibilities that did not exist before. So, I’d say that the tools are what has made dynamic publishing online quite valuable to PR practitioners - and educators.

Finally, for clarification on the “writeable web” discussion, I think Tim Berners-Lee made the first (1990) “writable web” app and made it work. I also think he used the term a long, long time ago. The browser that made it work was first called “WorldWideWeb” and later “Nexus.” (Source and Source and Source)

Two excerpts from the links above:

I wrote the program using a NeXT computer. This had the advantage that there were some great tools available -it was a great computing environment in general. In fact, I could do in a couple of months what would take more like a year on other platforms, because on the NeXT, a lot of it was done for me already. There was an application builder to make all the menus as quickly as you could dream them up. there were all the software parts to make a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get - in other words direct manipulation of text on screen as on the printed - or browsed page) word processor. I just had to add hypertext, (by subclassing the Text object).

and…

WorldWideWeb was written in Objective-C. It would browse http: space and news: and ftp: spaces and local file: space, but edit only in file: space as HTTP PUT was not implemented back then.

That speaks to how, at the beginning, you did sort of have to be a techie to do the read/write thing. But, it was there in the inception of the WWW.

I agree with my brother. The Bray interview is a good discussion. Jeremy Geelan, Group Publisher SYS-CON Media, is the interviewer. Video runs 21:11. The video is an interesting view from one of the truly big stars of software and the web. Worth your time to check it out.

Hat tip to my brother Bill for the link. Sadly, he is not blogging so I can’t trackback. But, he did recently set up a blog for his homeowner’s association, so Bill is in the fold now.  He is, by the way, quite the accomplished developer and coder and has worked on sites that you - I am sure - have surfed many times.  Hey, he’s my big brother, so I’m proud of him and brag.