Xark!

How blessed are you?

New Charleston

Defensive ornamentation, East Bay Street, Charleston (Dan Conover photo)

Because Charleston was founded in the 17th century at the southern tip of a north-south peninsula, power and class here have always run on something of a north-south axis. So in the 1970s, when the area around the navy base incorporated as North Charleston, the name spoke as much about the new city's blue-collar identity as it did about its relative location.

Well, I think it's time we imposed a new axis on Charleston. Not North and South, but Old and New. 

Charleston, for all its considerable charms, remains a backward-looking city. Not "backwards," as in unsophisticated or unintelligent, but more enamored of its past than its present. So while the city officially recognizes the value of its "creative cluster," its "tech sector" and its "knowledge-based industries," Charleston's institutions, typically dominated by the same old families and traditions, remain wary -- if not openly hostile -- toward new ideas and new people.

Since that anti-outsider bias tends to limit opportunity, Charleston has developed a reputation as a place where who you know is more important than what you know. It's why so many talented people here seem to direct their energies toward celebrity instead of substance.

Once upon a time I wanted to change that. Now I believe we should let eccentric, odd Old Charleston be whatever it wants to be. I thank Old Charleston for preserving this beautiful city, and aren't we stronger when we value and preserve indigenous cultures?

Instead, I want to encourage Charleston's outsiders to start appreciating their own significance. The prosperity of the Lowcountry depends on the energy, creativity and spirit of people who moved here "from off," and once we start acting on that knowledge it simply won't matter whether Old Charleston recognizes this truth.

New Charleston doesn't have to beat Old Charleston. It simply has to stop looking to Old Charleston for permission.

What are we waiting for?

Go to a New Charleston event -- Kulture Klash, Pecha Kucha, BarCampCHS, a TweetUp or an SMCCHS happy hour -- and look around. Hundreds, thousands of musicians, writers, artists, designers, art directors, photographers, programmers, Web-heads, researchers, engineers, architects, entrepreneurs, chefs, dancers, filmmakers, actors and big-thinkers live here. How many are "from off?" Most.

Yet I still meet people who tell me different versions of the same story. Instead of being encouraged in their new ventures, they are visited by members of the local establishment who always deliver the same message. Get back in line. There's some kind of old-boy system here, and it wants to pick the winners of every contest in advance. I don't understand it, but there it is.

My question is, so what? Yes, these people have some money. Yes the city has various programs and perks it can dole out to the favored few. Yes, the local paper acts an unofficial enforcer of Old Charleston orthodoxy. Again: So what?

We don't need mass media to spread the word. We don't need membership in exclusive social clubs to meet interesting people. And the sophisticated tool users here can do more with less money in less time and with less formal organization than Old Charleston can even imagine.

It isn't as if they're offering us an alternative. You're never going to be accepted into the Old Charleston clubs, so why bother conforming to their rules? What have you got to lose by ignoring them?

When we stop fighting and cajoling Old Charleston, we can invest all that energy into building a healthy New Charleston. A separate culture that reflects the values of the people who came here by choice. A culture that's more egalitarian, educated, productive and open.

This change doesn't require government loans or angel investors. Just start small. Cooperate. Do business with each other -- and with the thousands of like-minded Lowcountry natives who are our good friends and collaborators. Support each other. Work together.

Opposing an existing power structure gets us nowhere. Building our own power structure, with our own open networks and values, is progress.

In conclusion...

You don't undo an old habit. You have to create new habits, and to make them stick you have to reinforce those new patterns until the old ones silt over.

That's how we're going to make progress. And the funny thing is, Old Charleston won't even notice it.

It will simply benefit from it, along with the rest of us. Now go forth, join ranks, and start inventing a new city.

(BarCampCHS photo via Ken Hawkins on Flickr)

BarCamp Charleston: Geoff's video

Geoff Marshall has been a good friend since we met back in the early Lowcountry Blogs days. I helped him get a job at The Post and Courier and in the early days of the paper's web video push it was pretty much just the two of us, wandering around with cameras, figuring out technical tricks, comparing notes, and each of us trying to develop personal styles of storytelling.

It didn't take time much time for him to begin establishing a style that I thought was not only distinctly his, but very, very good.

Geoff covered BarCamp Charleston this weekend and just posted his video. I think it's excellent in all sorts of ways.

And it makes me feel a bit nostalgic. He's leaving Charleston in a few days with a one-way ticket back to London, his true home. So in a way, this #BarCampCHS video is his parting gift to the Lowcountry. It shows not only how far the tech community has come, but also how sophisticated Geoff has become.

Thanks, mate.

BarCamp Charleston!

It's Saturday, Oct. 24th. Be there. Aloha.

Opening to change

Like a lot of people in the 1990s, Netscape opened the Web to me. I kinda became Netscape obsessed, doodling that Netscape logo on pads during daily editors meetings. But when Netscape became Communicator and faded away, the romance went out of browser software for me.

Fast-forward to roughly 2003. My friend Richard Green, who ran tech for the newsroom, called me into his office to show me the new browser he wanted to install on my computer as a test. Like everyone else in the mainstream world I'd been using Microsoft Internet Explorer (and a bunch of other MS products) for years by then. It didn't excite me like Netscape once did, but that didn't matter. Web browsing was no longer novel. It was something you did, and IE was the utilitarian tool you used to do it.

So when Richard told me Firefox was a better product, my first response wasn't "Great! A better browser might make me happier!" It was "Why is this tech-obsessed geek picking on ME?"

A new form of writing

We all learned to write in more or less the same way: Beginning, middle, end; Subject, predicate, object; Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Beyond consisting of three items, each of these approaches shares another common theme: Inclusion. Everything necessary to understand the point is expressed explicitly on the page.

But when you write for the Web as you'd write for print, you write too long. You waste the reader's time explaining what she already knows.

When we write for the Web, we should use the Web's strengths to our advantage. This begins with thinking a little bit deeper about how information is constructed, because the Web can offer writers the benefit of  both clarity and brevity.

This post is an example: If you already recognized the concepts I used to build my argument, you're almost done reading. If you didn't, you can follow the links and read my explanations. And if you follow each back to its beginning, you'll find some definitive statements. Referencing one definitive statement for any concept or fact is an idea software engineers call "The DRY Principle," and I believe it's important to the future of both journalism and civilization.

Learning to write this way is a bit like playing three-dimensional chess, but it also reminds me of The Glass Bead Game. Sadly, writers today lack the technological tools and display conventions that would fully support and reward the required effort. But I suspect the ideas demonstrated here could lead us toward new ways of thinking and communicating that are far better adapted to the world we now inhabit.

Notes.

Image: This post as a rough semantic outline.Click to see full-size.

Organizing #CHS news Twitter from the ground up

The first time I encountered a hashtag on Twitter I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. I understood that adding a # symbol to a word or abbreviation created a more specific search string, but that was back before the days of Twitter Search. The concept was cool, but it didn't have powerfully practical applications.

But here we are, less than a year later, and nine of us (including representatives from three news outlets and Lowcountry Bloggers)  just sat down and agreed on a set of nine preferred hashtags for local news. Now that's progress.

The #CHS prefix
While Charleston County and Charleston the city are only geographical subsets of a larger community/media market generally known as the Lowcountry, we went with the tag #CHS to describe it. Reason? Because using our airport code is an efficient, already popular way of communicating a general location.

With that established, we moved on to subject tags.

Charleston hashtag summit

If you follow the local Twitterverse, you may have noticed chatter Sunday and today regarding a #CHSHASH Summit Tuesday at lunch. And you probably asked yourself "What the hell are these geeks talking about?"

For those of you who are new to the concept, hashtags are form of folksonomy.We make them up on the fly, generally, and the successful hashtags spread around the community and become near universal (#iestories) without any centralized direction. When this happens, it becomes really easy to organize live information streams via Search Twitter.

But variation in hashtags can cause nagging inefficiencies. For instance, most local Tweeters tag their Charleston-related Tweets with #CHS. (our airport code, requiring only four characters). But many people continue to use #CHARLESTON. Result? No matter which term you use, you're missing something.

Our thought? If we could get a group of local Tweeters -- particularly those involved in the creation or aggregation of original news content -- to agree on a standard set of news-related hashtags, then EVERYONE could benefit from this by creating live RSS feeds out of these search terms.

2020 vision: What's next for news

"As you can see, opportunity abounds."

A client looking to invest in media asked me earlier this month for advice on what might replace failing newspapers. My response? There are plenty of interesting ideas in play, but the first meaningful test won't come until a major American city loses its only metro daily. So wait.

That's because metro newspapers are taking up the market space in which the innovation he's looking for must occur. Newspapers may be failing, but most do a passable job of limiting serious competition in their markets. What succeeds in the shadow of an established metro, therefore, may not be what ultimately winds up contending for the market positions vacated by Old Media giants.

I think that's decent investment advice, but Clay Shirky's March 13th essay on the end of the newspaper era placed some urgency on the question “What Comes Next?” And since I'm a recovering newspaperman who's been studying and writing and speaking about that question off and on for the past four years, I figured now might be a good time to stake out some useful predictions about the future of American journalism to 2020.

CSS purity vs. table hacking

Our buddy Dave Slusher makes excellent points about why using tables (the pre-CSS structure for web design) is often more efficient than using CSS for a lot common Web tasks. Even as a CSS-purist (in theory, anyway... in my own work, I still often use tables) I found his latest post on the subject both funny and thought-provoking.

CSS fundamentalists are exactly as big a pain as any other form of fundamentalist and for the same reason - disagreeing with them pokes a big hole in the purity of their belief system and they feel the need to “correct you”.

While I'll cede the point, I do want to make one case for exception: The larger and more complex your site is, the more benefits you accrue from semantic web purity. Not today, of course, but moving into the unknowable future. If you're archiving a lot of data and documents, the extra effort you put into keeping your content / presentation division pure could be the difference between profiting from your work and facing an enormous and expensive data-recovery project.

Having worked for a news website, in which previous management had used tables and frames and inline styles and -- well, just about anything that struck their fancy, apparently -- it became obvious that starting over would be easier than trying to upgrade the existing site. And, since I believe the real value of big sites in Web 3.0 will be their machine readability (not just their searchability), trying to convert non-semantic sites to Semantic Web functionality will become a big issue during the 2010s..

CSS works poorly today because some browser makers (not to mention any names, MICROSOFT) refuse to work together on compliance. Consequently, EVERYTHING about web design remains a series of hacks and compromises. But this is a temporary condition: XML functionality is going to drive the next wave of Web profit, and for that to pay off, browsers are going to have to start rewarding sites that translate code properly.

The idea of a Semantic Web begins with the notion that content and presentation are separated for a reason. We're about 10 years in, and we're still waiting for the consistent browser support that will make that effort worthwhile. Since most companies focus on the now, there's really just no reason to fret about Web standards compliance. But if you're thinking ahead to the unpredictable future, here's one thing I think we can know: Whatever that future brings, it's likely to be based on XML.

If you build around that, I suspect it will wind up being worth it. But it's an investment, and investments involve risk and suspended gratification.