I Want to Start Another Movement

My last movement didn’t seem to work all that well, sadly. Sites like ArsTechnica still don’t provide full feeds (why, by the way?). However, I need to start another movement:

Take Back the Semantic Web!!!!!!

This is an anti-widget movement, an anti-Javascript include movement and an anti-”why not?” movement.

Here are the steps to joining the movement:

1) Strip your blog down to just the raw HTML, semantically describing the content: that means, remove all your widgets, all your “my friends company!” applications, Sphere links, Snap links, flash widgets, Twitter status things, LastFM widgets and all that shit.

2) Go and check your page weight, feel cleansed and whole again.

3) There is no step three. At this point, you should feel good and I will visit your site more.

Blogs are about content. They are about the removal of barrier between the voice of the blogger and the cognition of the user. Because of various technological standards, we have portability of this content, and portability of the context of cognition.

Web 2.0 should not have been about companies who’s intention was brining value-adds to this content within specific contexts. Its counter to the very nature of what blogging is supposed to be! Dave Winer knows this, Fred Wilson does not (it seems). All of these Javascript includes, these widgets and tools, cement a context to something that is supposed to be devoid of context.

A caveat here, some value-add services (like FeedFlare, etc) are context-agnostic, and thus don’t count. Advertising too works in such a way.

So my movement, I’m calling for people to strip their blogs down to the context-less content, semantically marked up, devoid of any tools which explicitly tie themselves to any experiential model.

No widgets
No javascript onHover events
No 5 different search methods (TechCrunch, looking at you here).

Just content.

2007
07/24
CATEGORY
musing
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  1. I’ve sometimes toyed with stripping my weblog down to just RSS feeds. The main page would be an RSS feed of full articles, the archives page an RSS feed of headlines, and each article an RSS feed with the article and comments. For people using web browsers rather than RSS readers I’d use XSL stylesheets to make each feed look like a normal webpage.

  2. Your post splits me in half (I found you, by the way, through a post about WBR and Drupal). My “blog” iherebydecree.com is just text (and one small background image). (I need to update the CSS, but that is a different matter) As a freelance developer my main business, or at least the thing I get the most work requests for, is widgets. So I agree and simultaneously disagree. I am of the opinion that blogs should also represent the persons who write them. I like just text, so I designed my blog that way. My friend is way in to music and so he has a little music player. My other friend really likes Digg and so he adds his recently dugg stories.

  3. It certainly doesn’t help that the widgets these companies tend to offer (particularly LastFM and that Flash crap they have) are giant, clunky monstrosities. Sometimes I think a small add on or two can be a nice touch if subtle, and mainly text. It’s this drag and drop / copy and paste crap that’s really a problem. But yeah, a lot of people could stand to learn from the lesson less is definitely more on the web.

Asides