How the Web and the Weblog have changed Writing by Philip Greenspun in May 2009 Site Home : Writing : One Page



Publishing from Gutenberg (1455) through 1990

the five-page magazine article, serving as filler among the ads the book, with a minimum of 200 pages

New Yorker

Filler Example: The Steve Ward Diet

Steve noted that this could also be called the "Bang-Bang Servo Diet" but that would likely be confusing to non-engineers (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang-bang_control).

Steve's diet is probably more effective than most popular diets. How come he isn't a bestselling diet book author? How do you turn an idea that can be explained in one paragraph into a diet book that people will buy? Printing that one paragraph really large would take up one page. Then you'd have a few example graphs, each with a personal story of someone for whom the Steve Ward Diet worked. Now we've got 10 pages. We still need 190 pages. So we add recipes for near-zero calorie foods: steamed broccoli; raw celery; lettuce au radis; etc. Eventually we have something that can be sold for $12.95 in a bookstore, but is it better than that one paragraph description?

Harry Greenspun, M.D., one of America's most brilliant doctors (according to our mother), offers his own diet: "Don't eat anything that a Caveman wouldn't have eaten; humans have not had enough time to adapt biologically to the agricultural revolution." What does that mean? "You can eat meat, vegetables that you pick up from the ground and fruits that you pick out of a tree. Don't eat pasta, bread, corn, potatoes, and other products of modern agriculture."

For Dr. Greenspun to get this idea to the public through commercial publishing channels would require him to add 200 pages of elaboration that would not make the diet more useful. Perhaps it could be a 20-page diet, but the market for pamphlets is very limited, and 20 pages is too long for a magazine sold in supermarkets.

Procrustes in New York and LA

How about a collection? If an author writes enough essays, eventually they can be collected into a 200-page book and distributed commercially. Many authors are experts on only a single subject and should not be encouraged to continue scribbling.

Publishing from 1990 to 2000: World Wide Web

supports any length of essay, including 20- or 30-page essays that previously had no home

allows anyone to publish, even on topics with very limited potential readership, due to zero marginal cost of distribution

allows authors with no funds or technical skill to publish, by filling out forms on, for example, GeoCities (1994)

allows readers to find relevant material at the "instant of curiosity" (Webcrawler search engine; 1994)

Building a 35mm Digital SLR System (18 pages; way too long for any photography magazine; to be useful in a magazine, would need to be reprinted every month)

Cirrus SR20 review (25 pages; helps people avoid wasting $300,000; only a few hundred of these airplanes are sold each year; flying magazines run 5-page articles at most)

Magic Ink (60 pages; user interface ideas; guy stopped writing when he ran out of ideas)

Dabblers and Blowhards, a critical look at some popular Web essays

The Autodesk File, a 900-page history of Autodesk/AutoCAD, with a lot of original documents

malagasyworld.org, one man's dream to document all 70,000 words in Malagasy, the non-Indo-European language spoken by 18 million people in Madagascar; for each word, the goal is to have a picture and 10 examples from literature

What was missing?

How would a reader consume one-paragraph ideas? Wait until an author had developed a few dozen and published a page of collected thoughts? Return periodically to an author's site to see if there were any new paragraphs added?

Marcus Aurelius: The first blogger?

Meditations

Do not disturb thyself by thinking of the whole of thy life. Let not thy thoughts at once embrace all the various troubles which thou mayest expect to befall thee: but on every occasion ask thyself, What is there in this which is intolerable and past bearing? For thou wilt be ashamed to confess. In the next place remember that neither the future nor the past pains thee, but only the present. But this is reduced to a very little, if thou only circumscribest it, and chidest thy mind, if it is unable to hold out against even this.

This was preserved because the author had been Emperor. How much ancient wisdom was lost because the common Roman citizen lacked TCP/IP? [By 1700 BC, the Minoans were trading with Spain, had big cities with flush toilets, a written language, and moderately sophisticated metalworking technology. Had it not been for the eruption of Thera (on Santorini), it is quite possible that Romans would have watched the assassination of Julius Caesar on television.]

After Marcus there have been quite a few folks whose collected short thoughts have interested readers, but in very few cases have those thoughts been made available in a timely manner.

Favorite things about the Weblog

good support for one-paragraph ideas

great repository for personal thoughts, if only so that the author him or herself can go back later to review

content over form; Webloggers generally use a standard style and don't play with colors and formatting the way that GeoCities authors used to

distributed comment system; no need for the entire conversation to be on one server

RSS feeds and aggregators

Weblog Examples

More

philg@mit.edu

Reader's Comments

There's an iPhone app that's been created for that style of diet now: http://www.linedietapp.com/ I guess Apps are a new way of publishing a simple practical idea rather than a book.



-- Matthew Lock, April 4, 2016