| Here is an interesting story. This piece has been a long time coming.
It is based on our inherent nature to copy.
Copy Cat 
Copying is how humans learn. It is how you are
formed,
arguably of course, by your surroundings.
Once you are verbal enough, you can join mankind
in the 'pasting' of information. This usually
starts around age 3, when nothing is more
hilarious than observing for the first time the
power of copy-paste.
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Mom: "Adam, please stop doing
that." |
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Me: "Adam, please stop doing
that." |
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Mom: "That's not very cute" |
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Me: "That's not very cute" |
It doesn't take long for most to figure out that
pasting must be done with care, for there is not
always an Undo button handy.
Later in life the two most universally know
key-combinations, Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V will become
part of your nature. I believe this combo is
pretty much the same on any modern operating
system and user interface. Undo (Ctrl-Z) is
shooting up the charts rapidly though.
Telephone
Another childhood memory, relevant to my thesis,
is the 2nd grade classroom
game of telephone, where the teacher
whispers a sentence or phrase into one child's
ear. The message is relayed in the same whisper
mode from pupil to pupil until the last person
repeats the words.
That's how the
rumour mill works, something else I learned
a lot about during our show. The output is
rarely equal to the original data, and often all
sense of context is lost along the way as well.
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Note to self, I want to play the
telephone game with a group of kids and
a group of adults, to determine if age
affects the copy-paste skills. |
Word Up
I can clearly remember the first time I used
copy and paste commands on a computer. I was
delighted with my new found power. I was capable
of 10 times the output of my producers at
MTV, who
still wrote out scripts (often in long hand)
that were placed on a conveyorbelt and slowly
rolled underneath a mounted camera. This image
was displayed in front of my camera's lens. It
wasn't long before I grew frustrated with
printing out my production notes for this
early-version
teleprompter. I wanted to copy-paste to it
dammit!
These days,
Microsoft Word is probably our first digital
copy-paste experience. Many, many a college
degree has been made possible thanks to Bill and
his bloated copy-paste machine. And we continue
to cherish this business tool as we keep adding
copy-paste bits to our
resume.doc file.
I love turning on Word's show changes on
screen
feature when someone sends me a word file.
Business proposals and invoices from lawyers are
my favourite. All copy-pasted bits neatly
underlined and in the colour red.
Enough already! What about weblogs?
Thank you for bearing with me. A brief summary:
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It is how we learn and teach |
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Our natural tools (ears, mouth,
hands, brain etc) aren't very accurate
replicators |
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Digital copy-pasting has
revoutionized our world and is much more
reliable. |
From jungle drums to
homer's mountaintop torches, it is our
copy-paste tools and skills that have made the
relaying of information possible over great
distances.
Yes, the telephone changed alot of that, but you
needed miles and miles of expensive wiring to
only get one shot at a paste per call. Bummer.
Beating drums is only limited by number of relay
stations, who all get my message as they pass it
on. Costs less too.
Weblogs are a combination of a copy-paste word
processor and relay station.
Remember, it's just software. This stuff is
designed to make complex tasks easier for
humans. That's why weblogs speak
their
own language when talking to each other. All
weblog software will allow you to copy data,
like words from a website, an email or word
file, and paste that onto the internet,
available for all to see. Talk about a
Power-Paste!
Really good weblog software helps you with your
copy-paste tasks, often
quietly copying all kinds of new information
from other weblogs that speak the weblog
language. usually one click of a button will
paste it to the internet for you.
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I found the google
results for pasting to the internet
rather amusing and dated. |
In turn, your weblog software is relaying this
message to anyone who wants to hear it. Not just
by other people copying the words from your site
and pasting it into their weblog, but through
the same underlying system built into your
weblog.
And that's where Weblogs and Word part ways.
Weblog software developers (makers of blogtools)
have pretty much agreed on many of the formats
and protocols that are used to make weblogs
copy-paste together smoothly and efficiently. In
contrast, have you ever been frustrated by not
being able to open a word document in another
word processor or even a different version
of Word? Sure it works, but you'll also be
introduced to the 'Search and Replace...'
command. Notice that Microsoft as of this
writing does not sell any form of weblog
software. That would be too human I guess.
In short, a weblog is a word processor with
ultimate copy-paste power. Additionally your
information is automatically archived in a human
and machine readable file system that enables
easy and efficient indexing. That's
Google's turf.
Reality
For the past 6 months my wife, our daughter and
I lived and produced a reality television
program for the dutch market called
Adam's
Family. We aren't your average family and
the press ate it (and sometimes us) up.
Traffic to my
dutch
weblog was much heavier than normal
(displaying your url on tv helps) which gave me
a great test environment for my copy-paste
experiments.
Realize that just because someone is a
'journalist' doesn't mean that person doesn't
copy-paste. After all, even big media is built
out of real people, right?
Difference is, 'official' (read: paid)
journalists working for any kind of traditional
media (print, radio, tv) are all living in a
Word World. In the WW, copy-paste has a
diffferent name:
plagiarism. Funny how just saying it reminds
me of the word
plague.
Copy-pasting in the print world is one thing,
but it gets worse when tv news copy-pastes from
print. Rarely (except in the UK on BBC) do you
see the full copy of a story in a newspaper
shown on a tv news broadcast. Not enough time to
do that in their centralized expensive Word
World. So they do a paste similar to the game of
telephone. That's where the trouble starts.
The end of the food chain imho is the tabloid
papers, who in turn copy paste from television
(in most cases) and other telephone-game
networks known as rumour mills. And these guys
know how to paste.
Big. With Big Fat Headlines.
Several journalists started reading my weblog,
and more than once I deliberately wrote
something that was newsworthy enough to get
their attention. Result: weblog to rags in 2
weeks. Often with tv and radio in between and
after. Copy-Paste.
Pim
It was actually last year that I got my first
real taste of weblog copy-paste power when I
wrote
The Big Lie, about untruths printed in the
New York Times about assasinated dutch
politician Pim Fortuyn. I pointed out their
copy-paste errors, and even traced several of
them back to their original dutch publication.
Translation between languages is a copy paste
function I'd like to see in the future.
I beat my digital drum so loudly that
others began to notice, and relayed by
copy-pasting, often adding their own thought
along the way. Eventually the times rectified
their statements. My signal had reached the
other side of the atlantic, intact, error free
and as effective as when it originated on this
very weblog.
AM/FM
It is important to note that weblogs have two
modes. Both do the same, but one is more
sophisticated. Pretty much like your car radio
still has AM in addition to the crystal clear
quality of FM, your weblog as the plain view you
see when you go to a website. This is done in
html, which I equate to AM radio. That's why
it's often hard to understand. Too much static
on the screen to do reliable copy-pasting.
XML is the FM side of your weblog, it
delivers no static at all, just pure data ready
for automagic copy-pasting.
The extent of your signal's reach is determined
now by the quality of the content. It must be
compelling enough for someone to take the
easiest of all decisons; to click the automatic
copy-paste button. Just one small click for
man...
BTW, I still listen to AM radio frequently and I
believe that a weblog's appearance and listed
links are paramount to determining an authour's
credibility and (public) personality. In future
I presume this data will also be
auto-copy-pastable.
Don't play telephone
I am convinced that any individual, group,
organization, company* or government can benefit
from weblogs. It will be just as revolutionary
to information as desktop publishing was.
History is being written every day on the
internet, neatly stored in weblog archives,
interconnected by links, searchable through
google, scalable by design.
Who doesn't want to be a part of history?
Adam Curry
Thanks to
Dave Winer who first told me that html was
the AM radio of the internet. Not to surprising
his weblog tool is called
Radio
UserLand.
*Weblogs do not necessarily have to be available
to the public internet and function quite well
with other weblogs confined to a corporate
network.
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