blogriter: Closer to the beginning than the end

We forget that our technologies enshrine mere conventions as though they were inherent within some inevitable cosmic order.

Hundreds of millions of users regard the html aref link as the only way to associate online texts. To the contrary, these represented a radical over-simplification of richer concepts well-understand decades before by Vannevar Bush and more recently by Ted Nelson.

But when it comes to online writing (individual and collaborative), including the design and implementation of both infrastructure and tools that support writers, we are surely closer to the beginning than the end of conventions closure. Or, at least, we had better be.

No doubt, the marketplace, which never finds technique interesting per se, but only as a means to accomplish a task, decides by sheer mass usage what will count as a permanent convention. The drop-dead simplicity of unidirectional links 'translates' across cultures everywhere. Developers should submit humbly to the adoption practices of their users, rather than herd them into virtual re-education camps which impose an abstract technical ideal.

Likewise, institutional entities (corporate or governmental) need to exercise, or be compelled to exercise, the same humility. Premature 'lock-in' to secure hegemony is tryannical, no matter who practices it. Institutions, so far as they represent human beings in fact, are certainly major players in the adoption process: fine. But they co-exist with other institutional players as well as 'mere' individuals (users).

Subverting unjust lock-in is a constructive task for software developers, not an anarchic reaction to mere marketplace size or power.

Nothing needs to be pulled down that has found a community (e.g., blogging tools). Anyway, it cannot be done (cf RSS and the doomed efforts to 'improve' it ...). However, it is just now becoming possible to think deeply about what has been learned over the past twenty years and, perhaps, to craft a distinct advance on the Web's first generaiton of virtual 'pencils' and 'teypwriters'.

Talk of ebook readers are all the rage, but what we need even more are devices, tools and, yes, robust conventions for those who write for such readers. Which means: just about everyone.