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October 25, 2002

Interview with Mena Trott

I suspect the Trotts are all over the place because they produce Movable Type and have a lot of users. But in honor of my interest in their software, and because this is the first interview with one of them I've seen, I'm tossing up a link to South by Southwest's interview with Mena Trott.

Fav insight:

I think that there will be some sort of fork between weblogging and personal publishing. At this moment, these two terms are rather synonymous; in the next few years, we're going to see a focus on microcontent provided by the individual and an emphasis on the tools that will allow us to create and access such content.

I read that as a comment on the underlying fadishness of blogging as a form. Someone who posts a link and a snark or two isn't a micropublisher: he's a guy with an opinion and easy means to post it somewhere. There are some interesting people doing and saying interesting things, and hopefully they'll rise to the top as the fad fades and the clutter washes out. In the Linux "web space," the same thing happens all the time, in ever-shrinking cycles, as micropublishers make a name on a scoop or two then fade away as their enthusiasm (and ability to turn a buck) flag. I watched two or three generations of these sites over a few years. Saying it's a sad thing to watch a site come and go is sort of like saying it's a sad thing to watch a tree get leaves and lose them: it's part of a cycle. The only thing that's sad is that I can't tell my browser these sites have an "expiration date," so the abandoned vanity site running on a server in some guy's bedroom can quietly slip from my bookmarks within a month of him getting bored and forgetting it's there.

As a sidebar, Andrew Sullivan laments the profitlessness of his 'blog as anything other than a loss-leader for his (shoddy) opinionating. He's at least getting around to admitting that he and Glenn Reynolds aren't exactly the poor, sad, disenfranchised media orphans their continual breast-tearing to the contrary implies. People with a regular column on Salon and talking head appearances on Fox News don't get to call themselves "little guys" anymore.