I had the opportunity to read more blogs and listen to a few podcasts this past holiday. In particular I started listening to the B & B Podcast by Benjamin Brooks and Shawn Blanc and Back to Work with Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann.

When you start consuming one media form (e.g., a blog) you inevitably stumble upon their podcast.

Now all these guys seem to know each-other, and they tend to propagate similar world-views (e.g., minimalism, pro-apple, great design, great UX, care and craft, etc.). By in large, that isn’t too interesting to me (probably because I have the same mindset). It’s when they differ that their commentary and interaction (which is already very thoughtful) goes to the next level.

Daniel Jalkut wrote a piece called Learn to Code which posited that “high-order” scripting is the new literacy. No doubt that this is empowering. It’s definitely helpful for me (although I think if there is one thing a person should know, it is RegEx, because that shit has saved my bacon a dozen times over). You should read Mr. Jalkut’s post if you haven’t already.

Guy English had a different view:

I appreciate where they’re coming from. I can, from a certain perspective, agree with the argument. But, let’s not kid ourselves, literacy is the new literacy¹. The ability to read, comprehend, digest and come to rational conclusions — that’s what we need more of. We don’t, as a society, need more people who have the mechanical knowledge to turn RSS feeds into Twitter spam. We don’t need anything more posted to Facebook, we don’t need anything we photograph to appear on Instagram and Flickr. If “scripting” is the new literacy then we’ve failed. We’ve become Mario drowning on a Water Level.

To be honest, I’m kind of appalled at the idea that there might be a day where societies are judged by the percentage of the population who can code (if you want to use that as the benchmark of literacy). Then again, I work at a company that sells eBooks and my livelihood is based on people buying books.

One of the things that I find interesting is that this type of interaction, at least when I first started blogging back in 2002, was done typically done via the comments feature that MovableType had.² These people are writing really thoughtful responses and taking ownership of their words. You don’t have the anonymous troll or link spammer in the comment threads anymore.

One of the new things that I am noticing is the “No Comments” trend. Some people like John Gruber have been doing it from the beginning. The authors are encouraging people to twitter a response, email them directly or post a reply on their blog (if they have one). Matt Gemmell posted a 1-month update on his experience after turning off comments. There are two points that I wanted to call out:

• I feel more willing to publish short pieces, and to write more frequently.
• I feel more positive, and I think the tone of my writing has evolved.

Bottom line, he feels it has been positive for him. I agree. I think comments are a barrier to the authoring experience. They require maintenance on the author’s part (although Disqus has a great admin interface for this), but more importantly, I’ve always felt that the directness of the feedback loop left me open to attack. Consequently, back in the early part of the 2000s, I felt that everything I needed to write about had to have some sort of gravitas. Exhaustion soon set in.

No comments makes me feel that I own this blog, versus me feeling like I manage some sort of BBS.