One of the pleasures of being involved with Webstock is the opportunity to meet people like Rob Malda and Matt Haughey. And the chance to get the founder of MetaFilter to interview the founder of Slashdot just seemed too good to pass up!
We’re privileged to present this interview for you. Rob talks about standing on the shoulders of a previous generation near the end of the interview — those of us working in the web today stand on the shoulders of Rob and Matt. Enjoy the read…
Matt: I was a daily reader of Slashdot from about 1997 onwards (I usually ignored the Linux stuff but liked everything else), and it was a key inspiration for me starting MetaFilter. I thought I could combine the new (for late 1998) short link style of blogs like kottke.org, peterme.com, and jjg.net with a community setup like Slashdot, but I specifically wanted a simple comment UI, so I basically looked at slashdot and made sure there was no threading, no ratings, no sorting, no extraneous form elements so it could just be a big textarea and a post button for comments.
What’s your reaction to hearing that? Did you ever wish the UI/design of early Slashdot could be different? What did you think of the big first wave of blogs around the year 2000 starting to take off?
Rob: That’s a lot of questions š
Regarding the simpler UI, initially Slashdot had a fairly simple UI as well. For the first 10 months there weren’t even user accounts: all posts were anonymous. But as we grew in size, the other cruft had to be added to allow defensive measures. By mid-1999 we had the roots of our moderation system in place, which existed for 2 reasons: To stop spam/trolling/garbage, and to promote quality content. But the latter was the byproduct of the former. The thing I tend to forget is that from 1997 to 2000, I was basically the entire engineering for the site. Also, I was the primary writer. And I was starting a business. So when the dust settles, the UI was pretty good for the era, but filled with compromises that I wouldn’t have to make today.
Regarding the first wave of blogs, I guess if I’m honest about it, I often feel like Slashdot never got the fair credit it deserved. As “Blogging” became a mainstream buzzword that you’d hear about on CNN, Slashdot simply got lost in the history. From my perspective, we figured out many of the details of Social Media Aggregation years before, and then a second generation came along and got all the credit… and it wasn’t because of their UI or technology or skill, it was because Slashdot was ALWAYS a niche operation. I stuck to my guns for my entire ride that Slashdot was one specific subject. A specific tone. A certain culture. In the earliest years, that niche represented a sizable percentage of the internet community. Blogging was completely mainstreamed by the time the Bush/Kerry campaigns and the networks made it conventional wisdom. At that point, bloggers were no longer “Nerds”, they were just people willing to type.
Matt: Looking back, I seem to recall Slashdot sort of aligned itself with more of a “we are a forum!” mantra back then. I remember in all the weblog early history stuff people would mention Slashdot or The Drudge Report as having some quasi-blog like elements but not really calling themselves that or embracing it. Does that mesh with your memories of the time? I seem to recall that for some reason in the late 90s, a lot of people felt it was important to say they weren’t blogging or blogs, but were instead journals or forums or everything/nothing (remember e/n?).
I recall weblog and blog being associated with a new fad around 1999 and there being some backlash — do you think that might be why Slashdot isn’t really considered an early blog but more of a paleo or proto kind of blog-like thing?
Rob: Slashdot was a lot of things, which is probably why it never gets pigeon-holed into any single bucket. We were a blog, a forum, a community, a social news system, and in fact we were a social network (you can still friend/foe people!) years before the term was popularized by that Book website and others. Since we were all of those things, we’re generally thought of as something else.
I still shun the term Blogging just as I shun the term Tweeting. It’s all just writing. It’s like trying to subdivide Novelist, Columnist, Blogger, Tweeter. Words are words. It’s not really interesting to keep slicing and dicing and sub-categorizing to me. I just write some stuff or share some stuff. Distinguishing between “Journalist” and “Blogger” is a waste of time. I’m all of those things and none of them.
Matt: I know the late 90s were kind of crazy for everyone, definitely including Slashdot, but if you could sum up your time at Slashdot through the following decade (2000-2010), how would you describe it? What were your day to days like during that stretch of the 2000s?
Rob: For me personally, I feel like Slashdot was very strong in the first half of that time. If you wanted to mark a few milestones, the bursting of the dot com bubble and then 9/11 represent sort of the end of Early Slashdot. At that point we knew what we were and what we were doing. We continued down that path for many years. Our traffic continued to grow, and since we were cheap to run, the rest of the business mostly ignored us. I don’t think people really understand how small scale of an operation it all was: we had 2-3 engineers for much of this time, and 3-4 writers. This basically was our entire operation and production teams. We were lean and mean, but it meant that we were unable to perform significant engineering changes. For the first 2-3 years, when I was doing all of the engineering I could simply sit down and build a new feature. But at some point, the mere act of maintaining a stable platform for our users, with our incredibly limited human and hardware resources became problematic. For a former hardware company, we had a remarkably limited amount of hardware. So instead of engineering new functionality for our users, we engineered more optimized systems. We became very scalable. And eventually this caught up with us. By the mid 2000s, the next generation of social media came onto the scene: the Diggs and Reddits of the world, and we didn’t have the resources to compete.
By the end of the 2000s and up until I left last summer, my focus shifted to be more on the editorial side. I wanted the product side to succeed: to add new features for the users, to fix bugs and stuff. But it was really hard to accomplish anything significant. For awhile, Slashdot’s engineering was a single guy. He was responsible for anything anyone wanted. Just one guy. Now he was an awesome engineer: but a solitary person can’t handle all the engineering and operational responsibilities for a site like Slashdot. The system has parts that are a decade+ old. So while the editorial group was able to do some good work, the site itself remained almost unchanged for the last few years save for a few superficial changes.
Matt: Did you have any big side projects during your time at Slashdot? Anything you’re most proud of that isn’t Slashdot?
Rob: These days I spend a lot more time with my 2 boys. I also did some early work on Everything2, I wrote a column for a magazine for several years. But I was pretty intensely focused on Slashdot for 14 years. The job was good to me too. I was well paid, and got to see some amazing things (like a Shuttle Launch and the inside of Pixar!). And it continues to sort of payoff for me: I’m looking forward to going to Webstock. I’ll meet some interesting people, and with any luck get to see something awesome connected to The Lord of the Rings. I’m told New Zealand is lovely in Feb.
Matt: What’s it like these days, I imagine it’s weird to view the site as a user and not have god-like admin controls. Do you still check in on the site?
Rob: I read Slashdot now exclusively via RSS. I’m still pleased with the majority of the editorial work being done. I’ve submitted a few stories anonymously too. But the day that all my admin controls disappeared I basically logged out and it truthfully hurts to go back. I miss it tremendously, and really wish that they had granted my request to be allowed to continue to post as an occasional special contributor or something. I suspect I’ll always feel like a piece of my heart is missing.
Matt: What’s next for you, do you have any general areas of the technology world that interest you these days?
Rob: I promised my wife that I would take a few months off from work before I began looking for a job. That time is now at an end, so it’s basically time for me to start shoving my resume out there and seeing what my next chapter looks like. I’m very interested in the way internet news is created and replicated. I’d love to find a way to work in that field again, but not directly as a news editor. I’d like to perhaps work on the tools that people use to consume. Alternatively, I love photography and writing, so I’d really like to have the chance to do more in depth writing on the subjects that interest me. Slashdot was always pretty limiting: 100-200 words was the typical max. It rarely afforded the opportunity to witness an event first person, or directly ask a question to someone who might add insight. I think it did some bad things to my short term memory- spending 14 years focused on such short snippets of information has done a real number on the attention span. But I’m still following very closely the tech world, especially gadgets, tablets, phones, open source, sci-fi, movies… Slashdot was after all based on the stuff I was personally interested in. That will never change.
Matt: Huh, I think of you as more of a creator and a maker than a guy that has a regular job. Have you considered building your own new thing or collaborating with various news organizations that could use your technical expertise? (I’m thinking of all the database-journalism stuff going on with people like Adrian Holovarty that helped launch Everyblock and what places like MSNBC are pushing and what the Boston Globe and The Atlantic are doing, or heck even what the Poynter Institute is trying to do with pushing reporters to learn some coding to better present data)
Rob: I tend to engross myself pretty hard core into things, so I just had to go cold turkey for a few months. You describe me in a very flattering light. I guess I’ll find out in the next few months if it’s deserved. I think I have some really unique skills and experiences that I hope will be useful somewhere in a way that provides me with interesting and meaningful work. For so many years Slashdot meant so much to me: I felt like the work i was doing mattered so much more than just a paycheck. Anyone who has been lucky enough to be in that sort of position would understand I guess. I imagine your work on MetaFilter might be similar- and since you’ve had the good sense to retain ownership, you are able to continue to shape your creation according to what you think is best. That matters a lot.
Matt: What’s your favorite bit of technology that you’ve encountered in the last year?
Rob: I saw the final shuttle launch. I cried. It’s really such an old technology, but it brought together my childhood and adult dreams in a single moment.
Matt: What’s your biggest disappointment in the tech world these days?
Rob: The internet is simply not as free as it was when Slashdot began. Government is increasingly legislating away our rights and criminalizing actions that are impossible to regulate. I know it’s inevitable, but it’s still disappointing to witness. The joy of logging in to an IRC chat room in the early 90s, to talk to people who were innovating powerful technologies simply for the sake of it was absolutely intoxicating. To be able to talk to the guy who was responsible for some component of your system. We were all pseudo-anonymous strangers brought together by the technology that we loved, and the belief that an open future was spread out before us. The future will be exciting for my children, but I’m afraid that their technology will come in boxes welded shut at the factory. Their software locked down. Linux, and the Internet broke everything wide open. It’s taken 20 years to get a lot of it boxed back up again. I hope there are still air cracks by the time my kids are old enough to jam screwdrivers in there.
Matt: Yeah, I definitely see that trend as well, there seems to be a real push-pull on the consumer side with simplicity and control. The iPad is a technical wonder, but it does have real limitations on what software you can run and what kinds of files you can view on it. People have speculated that perhaps by 2015 you might buy a Macbook that doesn’t have write access to the hard drive, and part of me understands why that would revolutionize computing for a lot of people but be absolutely horrible for power users like you and me.
Rob: And not just to power users, but to the next generation. We all stand on the shoulders of the generation before. This is true in EVERY medium. Writers, Artists, Programmers, Engineers. The trend in the last few decades to lock everything down… be it with rivets and welds, or with patents and copyrights that never expire… we’re crippling the next generation. The joy I felt being able to gut a PC, from the hard drive to the kernel during my formative years… you’re right: an iPad is amazing. I own one and love it. But what I got out of my first PCs in the 80s was more than what my kid will get out of an iPad today. I’m not trying to wax nostalgic, but there’s a potentially dark future out there. We’re crippling the next generation in the name of quarterly profits. Creativity and innovation requires more balance.
In the second of our interviews with a Webstock ’12 speaker, we’re both honored and delighted to present Adam Lisagor in conversation with Merlin Mann. They cover such topics as Webstock, the New Zealand accent, what it is Adam does, how he works and much, much more.
Thanks to both Adam and Merlin and enjoy the listen.
In the first of our interviews with Webstock ’12 speakers, we asked Bruce Sterling to interview Lauren Beukes. Lauren was excited enough about this to tweet with the hashtag #AlsoholyshitBruceSterlingisinterviewingme.
Here’s the interview. Thanks to both Lauren and Bruce.
Bruce: Since you’re a South African writer from Cape Town, you must get all those South African Writer cliche’ questions from your many foreign interviewers. Why don’t you tell us about a few of those? You don’t have to actually answer them.
Lauren: Ha, actually no-oneās really made a big deal about that. Or not unreasonably so. They usually ask me about other South African writers, which means I get to list my favourites (some of whom are friends). Best stuff Iāve read lately: Siphiwo Mahalaās wonderful African Delights, Deon Meyerās edge-of-your-seat thriller, 13 Hours, Diane Awerbuckās Cabin Fever, full of perfectly beautiful and fractured short stories and SL Greyās incredibly disturbing consumer horror, The Mall.
Bruce: If somebody in distant New Zealand has pretty much never heard of “Lauren Beukes,” what do you think they should wise-up-to first?
Lauren: The best place to get a sense of me is on Twitter. Also, if my Wikipedia profile is still stating that Iām a kraken-wrestling zeppelin pirate queen, thatās not *entirely* true. [Ed: sadly, it’s not]
Bruce: You seem to be into a lot of creative work that isn’t award-winning futuristic South African cyberpunk thriller novels. Stuff like kid cartoons, techno-art, political satire, TV scripts, music and comic books. What gives with all that? Is that like your “transmedia strategy”?
Lauren: I love the idea that it might have been part of a grand tactical plan rather than lucking into some very cool things along the way. Iām a brilliant āmanaged procrastinatorā. Iāll do anything to avoid writing a new book, including documentaries, comic books and kids animated TV shows. And itās a nice balance. In 2009, I was writing a cute pre-school show for Disney about a little princess and her dragon friends by day and going home to write dark messed-up fiction about a magical criminal Joburg underworld by night. It suits me to vary my projects. It means I donāt get bored. I had a day job as a freelance journalist for a very long time and then got into TV script-writing, documentary making and, for the moment, Iām now focusing entirely on comics and novels.
Bruce: I hear you “directed” a TV documentary recently. With what, gaffers, best boys, lighting and all that? That sounds like a lot of hard work.
Lauren: Ha! More like a skeleton crew running around trying to catch up to our subjects, three hopefuls in the run-up to the Miss Gay Western Cape beauty pageant. I was really lucky to work with a brilliant experienced crew, including DOP, Nick van der Westhuizen, editor Izette Mostert and my husband, Matthew Brown who produced and did some of the editing, all on a ridiculous schedule. The trailer is here, if anyone wants to check it out.
Bruce: One of your novels has its own techno soundtrack compilation. Would madame care to expound on that?
Lauren: Again, I wish I could say this was part of some strategic brilliance on my part, but it just seemed like a cool thing to do. When I finished writing Moxyland, I approached African Dope Records, which has always been the future sound of Cape Town to me, and asked them if theyād consider doing a soundtrack to the book. They were a bit taken aback, but the idea intrigued them and they signed on to do a CD and digital release. HoneyB and I handpicked tracks from their catalogue to match the mood of the book and Fletcher of Krushed & Sorted did the final mix. And then we did it again for Zoo City, with HoneyB pulling in extra tracks for that authentic Joburg sound, with kwaito and disco soul and electronica from GhettoRuff and KaleidoSound as well as a selection of artists from Dopeās list.
Bruce: Webstock has got lots of web-geekery going on. Why don’t you entice the readers with some thrilling descriptions of the personal hardware set-up that you use every day? For instance: Ever find a word processor you actually liked? Me neither.
Lauren: I use Word. I know thatās sacrilege. But Pages doesnāt do the stuff I need it to do and I just canāt get into Scrivener. It feels like the time I spend learning how to use it and adjusting my brainspace is time I could be spending writing. The most important software I use is Freedom to lock me out of the Internet for set durations so I donāt mess around. Otherwise, Kindle for travel reading, iPhone for Twitter and email and entertaining my three year old and an iPad 1 for reading Wired and wasting time I should be spending writing (or learning to use Scrivener) by playing Plants vs Zombies.
Bruce: So, what does that three-year-old eat? She looks pretty lively. I can remember dietary preference being a major power-issue at that age. 3.
Lauren: Oaties! Itās a less sugary generic of Cheerios. And sometimes, if weāre lucky, plain yoghurt, spinach, crumbed chicken, fish fingers, bacon and carrots dipped in tomato sauce (but never more than three). It is a big power struggle. And sheās very, very stubborn. And smart. And often outwits us.
Bruce: You sure are super-active on Twitter. And you commonly tweet stuff like: “Was the US military drone virus caused by pilots playing Mafia Wars?” You wanna explain Twitter to people who still think it’s all about tweeting one’s lunch?
Lauren: Partly, itās about finding cool curators of interesting links that wouldnāt normally cross your input field (although I suspect most Webstockers would have already picked up that particular one, which was from BoingBoing). You turn up some great stuff that I never would have found on my own, so does William Gibson, Charl Blignaut, @gammacounter, @theremina and @joeyhifi, among others I follow.
Itās an open conversation, a way of engaging with intriguing minds, of having cool random strangers engage with you, in a way thatās not weird or invasive (apart from that guy who was all āYo, āsup, read my shit! Iām an awesome fukin writer.ā by way of introduction.)
Bruce: Besides trips to other nations of the southern hemisphere, what comes next for Lauren Beukes?
Lauren: Iām hard at work on my new novel, The Shining Girls, about a time-travelling serial killer, which is due out in early 2013, and a twisted take on Rapunzel for Vertigoās Fairest mini series, a spin-off of Bill Willinghamās brilliant and epic Fables, which should be out around August 2012.
We asked Darryl Gray, BNZ design consigliere, and founder of Hive, a nifty tool for scheduling projects and people, to interview Webstock speaker and all round awesome dude, Jason Cohen.
Darryl:Your Webstock talk (‘A Geek Sifts Through The Bullshit’) encourages a commonsense approach for startups, rather than following a set doctrine. How and when should entrepreneurs follow the advice of internet darlings such as 37Signals?
Jason: The thing to remember is these doctrines aren’t rules, they’re better named as “styles.” There’s no rules in business any more than there’s rules in art. It’s useful and healthy to explore various styles, figuring out which resonate with you, as you develop your own.
Rather than asking “When should I follow 37signals,” the question should be: “How do I know which of the various bits and bobs (as you say in NZ) from the 37signals blog applies to me?” If you can answer that, you can filter any advice anywhere, and that’s an invaluable life skill. That’s what the talk is about.
Darryl: You coined the notion of the Startup Death Clock (readers: calculate your own death at http://startupdeathclock.com). Tell us about the idea behind it and people’s reaction to it.
Jason: Sweet! I always wanted to coin something, but it’s something you can’t claim to have done yourself, just like you can’t give yourself a cool nickname. (Now I just need a cool nickname.)
The idea came from fear and worry of course. It’s something every founder faces; sometimes great “ideas” are merely articulating what everyone already knows tacitly but isn’t mindful of. It’s the simplest spreadsheet you’ll ever make (unless you use Excel for groceries like my wife does, but then she’s a chef and efficient at such things), and yet it’s a punch in the face. Or a kick in the ass — that sets the momentum better.
I think people loved it because it’s a combination of simplicity (easy to understand, implement) and truth. That’s always popular. The best bloggers already know this… It’s just easier said than done, for all of us.
Darryl: You’ve had all manner of roles in your startups (“salesman, designer, marketer, accountant, and changer of the pellets in the urinals”). Do you think that kind of experience is important for all entrepreneurs?
Jason: Yes, if you’re not the janitor you’ll never understand whether HTML5 is revolutionary or just another goddam thing.
Seriously, it depends on what you make by “experience.” If you mean “You need this experience first in order to be successful,” then absolutely not. I didn’t; most successful entrepreneurs I know didn’t either.
If you mean “You need to be eager for new experiences and willing to jump in on topics you’re uncomfortable and unknowledgable about, rather than saying ‘it’s HIS job’ or blathering on about how you’re ‘wearing so many hats’,” then yes. Get in there. The days of “I’m just a coder” or “I’m just a designer” are over. Not if you’re an entrepreneur.
Darryl: A theme of your blog is encouraging small businesses to ask hard questions of themselves, and give honest answers. Are most startups you meet in denial? (Bonus question: If so, how can they change?)
Jason: Of course, because most people are. Your idea is your baby. It’s tied up in your ego as well as your finances. It’s fine to do lip-service to the idea of being introspective and listing to potential customers, but in my experience few people actually ask the tough questions or change their mind. Human nature.
I’m not sure if you can fundamentally change who you are, but you can consider this: If you’re backing off rooting out the truth, you’re just making it less likely that you’ll succeed aren’t you? And final success — at whatever your venture morphs into — is the thing that will fulfill you, impress others, pump your ego, and whatever else you’re doing this for.
Seek truth and ultimate success, not validation of immediate ideas and notions. Don’t think of it as being wrong, it’s finding something even smarter.
Darryl: Tell us why you encourage small companies to “stop acting like a faceless, humorless, generic, robotic company!”
Jason: Because that’s who we enjoy doing business with, and because it’s one of the few things a small company can do that a large company cannot, and therefore an automatic competitive advantage that’s silly to discard.
Darryl: As you’re about to discover, New Zealand is a long, long way from ā¦ well, anywhere. What advantages do Kiwi entrepreneurs (or anyone outside Silicon Valley, for that matter) have when launching a web startup?
Jason: Silly-con Valley is where almost all companies go to die. You just hear about the raging successes because those make good press, but that’s not the usual story. So anyone striving to create a company that actually makes money for making a product people actually want is already, in my book, ahead of northern California.
Advantages in NZ in particular? It won’t be in connectedness, fast turn-around for tech support (for America/Europe), or access to vast capital or lots of employees. So it’s any company that thrives on the opposite: A product that doesn’t need tech support or big investment. A company which isn’t trying to be Facebook, but rather just trying to make a nice living for 1-3 people.
Example: The best on-line training class in CSS3 and SASS, sold for $99. It’s training in itself so you don’t need “tech support,” it’s needed by a million people, it’s useful world-wide, no one cares where the author is located. There’s a hundred other examples.
Darryl:What’s the single most important piece of advice for a fledgling web entrepreneur?
Jason: Success = Tenacity + Luck. Most startups die because the founder loses interest.
Darryl: Your latest company, WP Engine (wpengine.com), provides a fast, secure, and scalable platform for WordPress content. How did the company come about, and what interests you most about this area?
Jason: I needed it myself, then I interviewed 50 people and found that, with a pitch developed as I went along, 30 of them were willing to pay $50/mo if I built it. 20 of those actually did buy after we launched, by the way.
It was easy to recruit people to work for WPEngine, which is another good sign. If you can’t convince people to join in for little to no salary, how do you expect to convince customers or investors?
What interests me personally is the art of optimization. See, after all the writing and marketing and business philosophy crap, I’m still just a geek, and I’ve always liked optimization — making things faster, more scalable, more robust. WordPress needs it, and millions of people want WordPress to be optimized, so in this case personal passion matches (well enough) with market need.
Mike Brown from Webstock interviewed Merlin Mann. Well, not so much an interview as a conversation. Ok, so, not so much a conversation as Merlin talking and Mike valiantly saying ‘yes’ and ‘good’ and ‘cool’ on occasion š
Still, lots of good stuff about Merlin’s workshops and keynote at Webstock; the three desert island albums each would choose; and what it is that Merlin actually does!
Enjoy. And it goes without saying, but we will anyway — we’re really, totally and utterly looking forward to having Merlin at Webstock!
