Mike and I ‘met’ on the high seas of the blogosphere as a result of him commenting at a blog about the Vendee Globe that I’ve been writing. This alerted me to New Freebooters, where he was also covering the race. We had a quick chat via email and decided to experiment with a blog-swap.
I don’t know who originally said that a blog is the atomic unit of social media, or that the post is the atomic unit of a blog, but one thing is certain: the way normal (well, fairly normal) non-technical people like Mike and myself can use these simple, free publishing tools to create a website and then link it up with what other people are saying is a phenomenal advance in the way we communicate with each other. The most exciting thing, perhaps paradoxically, is that it facilitates the most ancient and basic urges in human behaviour – namely, the need to gather around stuff we love and chat. I mean, monkeys do that… it’s nothing new. We haven’t changed. The tools just got better, more human.
So Mike and I, in our own ways, and you the readers of his blog (or at least the ones who are into sailing) are really just a bunch of slightly more evolved monkeys. The computer screen that you’re reading this post on is a kind of distributed fire-light around which we’re all gathered in conversation about the Vendee Globe.
I find this to be an immensely cheerful and encouraging thought. The urge to spend time with each other speculating, telling stories and swapping personal insights is the best thing about us humans, and all else that is good about life flows from it.
In this case, we’re coming together to discuss a race we can’t see, a race that we know is going on somewhere over the horizon and for much of its course on the other side of the world. The Web is a brilliant way – and probably the only meaningful way – we have to follow it. We’re getting video from these boats. The boat I am writing about – Artemis – is skippered by my brother Jonny and he’s sending the equivalent of text messages from the boat. And Mike and I are scouring the Web and collecting bits and pieces of the story together to re-publish them at our websites, which are in turn linked together. It’s a big storytelling tool covering a ‘live’ story happening in real-time – events rippling out from the boats across the Web.
I hope that doesn’t sound too pretentious or abstract. It might do. I’d better fill you in with some context and quickly tell you a bit about JonnyMalbon.com.
Jonny’s skippering Artemis, an IMOCA Open 60. Artemis has an official site and that’s, you know, “okay” – it’s a fairly standard website with some great content but kind of lacks the live-ness, dynamism and immediacy of a blog. There are some fairly basic things that it doesn’t do that make it difficult for it to flow round the Web the way a blog can. And to be fair, the updating of that site is a job rather than being someone’s passion. We wanted to try and do something quite different. We wanted to conduct an experiment: how can you use hypertext and links, blogs, embeddable video and images from all over the Web to create a community around Jonny’s trip? I think a blog is the perfect way to do this: lightweight, easy to use, quick to design and deploy (4 days), flexible (we’ll be making changes throughout the race) and very, very social – you can comment on it, link to it easily, read it anywhere and everywhere you go by subscribing to its feeds. Every time we post something new the blog sends a message (it’s called a ‘ping’) out to search engines telling them (and therefore everyone out there who’s interested) to come and have a look. And we’re using Twitter, a free micro-blogging tool, to make it possible for Jonny to update the blog by email in 140 character bursts whenever he wants – these are then broadcast to people ‘following’ his progress (he currently has 54 followers – not bad for the first week).
We’re going to see just how far we can go in growing this community: a bunch of landlubbers following a lonely guy sailing a small speck of carbon fibre in outer space. We’re all connected by capillaries that carry bits of information back and forth across this loosely coupled ad hoc network.
I’ll be back with a post about the other people updating the content on the site a bit later on. I hope you enjoy the site and I’ll be very interested to hear what you think – especially if you have any ideas about what we should do next. I’m serious about this being an experiment. Let’s have some fun with it.
