Eclecticism

On the bright side, webloggers now have protection against libel suits:

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that Web loggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can’t be held responsible for libel for information they republish, extending crucial First Amendment protections to do-it-yourself online publishers.

Online free speech advocates praised the decision as a victory. The ruling effectively differentiates conventional news media, which can be sued relatively easily for libel, from certain forms of online communication such as moderated e-mail lists. One implication is that DIY publishers like bloggers cannot be sued as easily.

On the downside, though, the case that prompted this decision is truly bizarre, and I have to feel sorry for the woman whose case was just overturned by the ruling.

The case traces back to a North Carolina town in 1999, where handyman Robert Smith was repairing a truck owned by attorney and art collector Ellen Batzel. Smith claimed to have overheard Batzel say she was related to Nazi Gestapo head Heinrich Himmler. He said he concluded that the European paintings he saw in her home must be stolen goods, and shared this in an e-mail he sent to the editor of the Museum Security Network, an organization that publishes information about stolen art.

Without telling Smith the e-mail would be published, Ton Cremers — the sole operator of Amsterdam-based Museum Security Network — made minor edits, then posted Smith’s e-mail to a list of about 1,000 museum directors, journalists, auction houses, gallery owners and Interpol and FBI agents.

Three months later, Batzel learned of the post. She contacted Cremers to deny both the stolen art and Nazi ancestry allegations. She also said Smith’s claims were motivated by financial disputes over contracting work.

… Batzel sued Smith, Cremers and the Museum Security Network for defamation and won. Cremers appealed.

And during the hearing over Cremers’ appeal, his appeal was upheld (in part), Batzel’s suit was denied, and webloggers gained protection from libel suits. While I’m certainly happy about the decision and its ramifications for weblogs, it’s a shame that it came at such a cost for Batzel.

(via Nyxnata)

Any ideas?

Eric’s put out a call for ideas for alternative formats that might both satisfy web usage habits and allow for a more temporally sensical page structure. I’m quite interested in seeing what, if anything, he comes up with, and finding out how workable any proposed solutions are (if at all).

However, I can’t really see merely swapping things around on the front page so that new posts show up at the bottom and scroll upwards, either. While it might make more chronological sense, the “most recent at the top” format is so ingrained in our heads that I think flipping the main page into true chronological order might be too confusing, disorienting, and generally more trouble than it’s worth.

I have to admit, I’m a bit lost on alternatives — in fact, the only viable alternative I can think of off the top of my head is adopting a single-post front page format (such as Marc Pilgrim uses, or as I do on WüdiVisions). My issues with this are simply that not all of my posts are long enough to give any “weight” to the front page, and when I post multiple times over the course of a day, any single post might have anywhere from a few hours to as little as a few minutes on the front page before it would disappear into the archives.

So what sort of solutions might there be out there? Right now, both my main page and my monthly archive pages are “backwards” — forwards by current web usage, but not chronologically. While I could fairly easily switch my archive pages around to display the beginning of the month at the top of the page and progress downwards (as Eric has done in his archives), that doesn’t necessarily work as well for the front page.

…our collective behavior when it comes to reading weblogs is a stunning example of an entire community adopting hugely counter-intuitive behaviors in order to conform to a received truth (that weblog entries should be ordered most to least recent). …if you read a twenty-chapter book the way you read weblogs, you’d start at the beginning of chapter 20, read it, skip back to the beginning of 19, read that, and so on until you finally worked your way back to chapter 1 and finished the book. How much sense does that make? Close to none.

I’ve noticed this myself from time to time, and admittedly, it can get quite frustrating. Not so much on normal day-to-day browsing if you’re able to keep track of any given site fairly frequently, but when playing the catch-up game after being out of the loop for a bit. Once you load a site, it’s not at all uncommon for people to refer back to previous posts, which you may have missed, so you have to backtrack to read them, then jump back to the current post…not that bad in the short-term, but aggravating after a while.

Here’s what I mean: the most-recent-first format is broken. No other form of written communication works that way, and in fact almost no form of human communication works like that. There’s a reason why. Reading a weblog is like watching Memento, which I agree was a cool movie, except all weblogs are like that so it’s as if every single movie released in the past seven or eight years was structured exactly like Memento. …If weblog entries were ordered like the weblogs themselves, this would be the next-to-last paragraph, and the one above would be below it instead.

Weblogs are “temporally broken”, according to Eric Meyer.

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Okay, yes, I deliberately swapped the paragraph order around in the main part of the post. If you’d rather not try to run through the mental gymnastics of re-ordering the paragraphs, here’s the “correct” version. ;) Weblogs are “temporally broken”, according to Eric Meyer.

Here’s what I mean: the most-recent-first format is broken. No other form of written communication works that way, and in fact almost no form of human communication works like that. There’s a reason why. Reading a weblog is like watching Memento, which I agree was a cool movie, except all weblogs are like that so it’s as if every single movie released in the past seven or eight years was structured exactly like Memento. …If weblog entries were ordered like the weblogs themselves, this would be the next-to-last paragraph, and the one above would be below it instead.

I’ve noticed this myself from time to time, and admittedly, it can get quite frustrating. Not so much on normal day-to-day browsing if you’re able to keep track of any given site fairly frequently, but when playing the catch-up game after being out of the loop for a bit. Once you load a site, it’s not at all uncommon for people to refer back to previous posts, which you may have missed, so you have to backtrack to read them, then jump back to the current post…not that bad in the short-term, but aggravating after a while.

…our collective behavior when it comes to reading weblogs is a stunning example of an entire community adopting hugely counter-intuitive behaviors in order to conform to a received truth (that weblog entries should be ordered most to least recent). …if you read a twenty-chapter book the way you read weblogs, you’d start at the beginning of chapter 20, read it, skip back to the beginning of 19, read that, and so on until you finally worked your way back to chapter 1 and finished the book. How much sense does that make? Close to none.

So what sort of solutions might there be out there? Right now, both my main page and my monthly archive pages are “backwards” — forwards by current web usage, but not chronologically. While I could fairly easily switch my archive pages around to display the beginning of the month at the top of the page and progress downwards (as Eric has done in his archives), that doesn’t necessarily work as well for the front page.

I have to admit, I’m a bit lost on alternatives — in fact, the only viable alternative I can think of off the top of my head is adopting a single-post front page format (such as Marc Pilgrim uses, or as I do on WüdiVisions). My issues with this are simply that not all of my posts are long enough to give any “weight” to the front page, and when I post multiple times over the course of a day, any single post might have anywhere from a few hours to as little as a few minutes on the front page before it would disappear into the archives.

However, I can’t really see merely swapping things around on the front page so that new posts show up at the bottom and scroll upwards, either. While it might make more chronological sense, the “most recent at the top” format is so ingrained in our heads that I think flipping the main page into true chronological order might be too confusing, disorienting, and generally more trouble than it’s worth.

Eric’s put out a call for ideas for alternative formats that might both satisfy web usage habits and allow for a more temporally sensical page structure. I’m quite interested in seeing what, if anything, he comes up with, and finding out how workable any proposed solutions are (if at all).

Any ideas?