The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter - Страница 113

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The phenomenon quickly spread. In 1997 John Barger, who produced a fun website called Robot Wisdom, coined the term weblog, and two years later a web designer named Peter Merholz jokingly broke the word back into two by saying he was going to use the phrase we blog. The word blog entered the common parlance.^IV By 2014 there would be 847 million blogs in the world.

It was a social phenomenon that was not fully appreciated by the traditional wordcrafting elite. It was easy, and not altogether incorrect, to denigrate much of the self-centered blatherings that appeared on blogs and to smirk at those who spent their evenings posting on little-read pages. But as Arianna Huffington pointed out early on when she created her blogging outlet, the Huffington Post, people decided to partake in these acts of social discourse because they found them fulfilling.⁶³ They got the chance to express their ideas, tailor them for public consumption, and get feedback. This was a new opportunity for people who had previously spent evenings passively consuming what was fed to them through their television screens. “Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college,” Clive Thompson noted in his book, Smarter Than You Think. “This is something that’s particularly hard to grasp for professionals whose jobs require incessant writing, like academics, journalists, lawyers or marketers.”⁶⁴

In his own sweet way, Justin Hall understood the glory of this. It was what would make the digital age different from the era of television. “By publishing ourselves on the web, we reject the role of passive media marketing recipient,” he wrote. “If we all have a place to post our pages—the Howard Rheingold channel, the Rising City High School channel—there’s no way the web will end up as banal and mediocre as television. There will be as many places to find fresh and engaging content as there are people who yearn to be heard. Good telling of human stories is the best way to keep the Internet and the World Wide Web from becoming a waste vastland.”⁶⁵

EV WILLIAMS AND BLOGGER

By 1999 blogs were proliferating. They were no longer mainly the playpen of offbeat exhibitionists like Justin Hall who posted personal journals about their lives and fancies. They had become a platform for freelance pundits, citizen journalists, advocates, activists, and analysts. But there was one problem: to publish and maintain an independent blog required some coding skills and access to a server. Creating user simplicity is one of the keys to successful innovation. For blogging to become a whole new medium that would transform publishing and democratize public discourse, someone had to make it easy, as easy as “Type in this box and then press this button.” Enter Ev Williams.

Born in 1972 on a corn and soybean farm on the edge of the hamlet of Clarks, Nebraska (population: 374), Ev Williams grew up as a lanky, shy, and often lonely boy who never got into hunting and football, which made him a bit of an oddity. Instead he played with Legos, built wooden skateboards, took apart bikes, and spent a lot of time on of his family’s green tractor, after he had finished his irrigation chores, staring into the distance and daydreaming. “Books and magazines were my outlet to the larger world,” he recalled. “My family never really traveled, so I never went anywhere.”⁶⁶

He didn’t have a computer growing up, but when he went to the University of Nebraska in 1991 he discovered the world of online services and bulletin boards. He began reading all he could about the Internet, even subscribing to a magazine about electronic bulletin boards. After dropping out of college, he decided to start a company to make CD-ROMs explaining the online world for local businessmen. Shot in his basement with a borrowed camera, the videos looked like a no-budget community access show, and they didn’t sell. So he wandered off to California and took a job as a junior writer at the tech publisher O’Reilly Media, where he revealed his prickly independence by sending an email to the entire staff refusing to write material for one of the company’s products because it “was a piece of shit.”

With the instincts of a serial entrepreneur, he was always itching to start his own companies, and at the beginning of 1999 he launched one called Pyra Labs with a savvy woman named Meg Hourihan, whom he’d briefly dated. Unlike others jumping into the dotcom frenzy of that period, they focused on using the Internet for its original purpose: online collaboration. Pyra Labs offered a suite of Web-based applications that allowed teams to share project plans, lists of things to do, and jointly created documents. Williams and Hourihan found that they needed a simple way to share their own random notions and interesting items, so they began posting on a little internal website, which they dubbed “Stuff.”

By this time Williams, who had always loved magazines and publications, had gotten into reading blogs. Rather than personal journals such as Hall’s, he became a fan of the technology commentators who were pioneering serious Web journalism, such as Dave Winer, who had created one of the first weblogs, Scripting News, and designed an XML syndication format for it.⁶⁷

Williams had his own home page, called EvHead, on which he posted a section of updated notes and comments. Like others who added such logs to their home pages, he had to type each item and update using HTML code. Wanting to streamline the process, he wrote a simple software script that automatically converted his posts into the proper format. It was a little hack that had a transforming effect. “The idea that I could have a thought and I could type in a form and it would be on my website in a matter of seconds completely transformed the experience. It was one of those things that, by automating the process, completely morphed what it was I was doing.”⁶⁸ He soon began to wonder whether this little side dish could become a product of its own.

One of the basic lessons for innovation is to stay focused. Williams knew that his first company had failed because it tried to do thirty things and succeeded at none. Hourihan, who had been a management consultant, was adamant: Williams’s blogger scripting tool was neat, but it was a distraction. It could never be a commercial product. Williams acquiesced, but in March he quietly registered the domain name blogger.com. He couldn’t resist. “I have always been a product guy, and am just always thinking about products and thought this would be a cool little idea.” In July, when Hourihan was on vacation, he launched Blogger as a separate product, without telling her. He was following another basic lesson for innovation: Don’t stay too focused.

When Hourihan returned and discovered what had happened, she started shouting and threatened to quit. Pyra had only one other employee besides themselves, and there was no capacity to take on distractions. “She was pissed,” Williams recalled. “But we talked her into thinking that it made sense.” It did. Blogger attracted enough fans in the ensuing months that Williams, with his laconic and awkward charm, became one of the stars of the March 2000 South by Southwest conference. By the end of the year, Blogger had 100,000 accounts.

What it did not have, however, was revenue. Williams had been offering Blogger for free in the vague hope that it would entice folks into buying the Pyra app. But by the summer of 2000 he had pretty much abandoned Pyra. With the Internet bubble bursting, it was not an easy time to raise money. The relationship between Williams and Hourihan, always a bit fraught, degenerated to the point that shouting matches at the office were a regular occurrence.

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