Web Authoring as Poetry

I once read that poetry was a more egalitarian form of art than prose writing. The argument was that poetry could be written in snatched moments on scraps of paper. It could be written on the factory floor without your bosses knowing what you got up to, the fruit of the labour easily hidden away. Prose, on the other hand, requires time. You need to be uninterrupted.

I strikes me that a similar way of writing to poetry could develop with web pages. Most of us don't create web sites for a living - that takes time. What we can do is used web-based authoring tools, such as the ones provided by sites such as GeoCities, to capture small thoughts. We're not writing essays here, we're just capturing the little things that interest us. Put a few tags around these thoughts and a web page is born. A web site could then be a collection of these thoughts that perhaps over time is organised into something coherent - but it doesn't matter if they always remain little nuggets apart from one another. We can do this sort of things in our lunch hours or perhaps when we have ten minutes at home. No one need even know what we are doing until, of course, they go to our sites.

Postscript: Dave Winer

Since writing this original piece, the respected internet columnist and software developer Dave Winer has decided to spend less time writing his column Davenet and more time to his weblog Scripting News.

This typifies the kind of change I described in my original article. It's a move from producing polished articles to tapping into a stream of consciousness. From the readers perspective they loose coherence but gain immediacy - they perhaps feel closer to the author because of it but have to spend more time reading what the author has to say.

Postscript: Inverted Pyramids

Jakob Nielsen approaches this topic from another angle in his article Inverted Pyramids in Cyberspace. Whereas the weblog is an example of an approach that is easy for writers to produce, the inverted pyramid is an approach that works better for readers. Rather than taking the traditional academic approach of writing which builds an argument and places the conclusion at the end, the inverted pyramid approach places the conclusion at the beginning, followed by some examples and then the discussion. This favours the casual reader who does not need to read until the end to find out what the writer is trying to say and acknowledges that in hypertext the reader rarely finishes an article before going to another page. The inverted period style is also popular with newspapers, allowing a quick "skim" to be meaningful but allowing deeper reading if wanted.

I don't believe the inverted pyramid negates the weblog. The weblog facilitates the presentation of thoughts that might never be aired otherwise. The inverted pyramid is obviously more time consuming to produce but ultimately serves the user better than a stream of undigested thoughts.

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