The blog sync

Joi Ito is an (or perhaps I could even dare saying the) überblogger. And a connector, entrepreneur, investor, Internet activist (he sits on ICANN’s board). I met him for the first time at the World Economic Forum in Davos a few years back, crossed his path again later, and tried to keep up with his online activities – which isn’t easy, for the man seems to be everywhere at once and posts frequently and insightfully. Or at least he did. Here is a post of September 2003 where he describes his daily "big sync":

As I was taking a shower this morning I did a self-analysis of my morning process which seems to be standardizing for the moment.
I become aware around 2am and start getting the feeling that something important might be going on that I'm missing. I crawl out of bed between 3am-4am, turn on my computer, go make coffee, and sit down, still a bit groggy. I startup email and NetNewsWire. I scan my inbox quickly for any urgent business email and take care of that while NetNewsWire is getting my RSS feeds. Then I go to the folder containing email from MT and read my trackbacks and comments on my blog. I respond to anything urgent there. Then flip over to NetNewsWire and scan the Technorati feed of new inbounds to my blog and read most of them. I comment on people's blogs where I can. Then I startup iChat and MSN Messenger to see if anyone needs me urgently. Then I chat and go through as many of the 150 RSS feeds as I can. I have the feeds ordered in different folders based on the order I want to read them. I open anything I might want to blog about into browser windows as I go through the feeds. Then I open IRC and see if anything important is going on in that community. Then I multi-task email, blogging, chat and RSS feeds until it's time to take a shower and go to work. Inevitably I think of something to blog while I'm taking a shower and end up here... a bit late for work, but trying to get the blog entry out. (And this inevitably ends up in a poorly written entry.)
It feels like a big sync every morning. Then throughout the day, emails to my cell phone, quick hits of IRC, iChat, email and RSS keep me synched. If the morning sync fails, I find myself unable to keep up during the day...

But now it looks like Joi is getting bored:

I'm sitting in a car on the way home from the airport after arriving in Japan from New York. I had a 14 hour plane trip where I caught up on email and wrote some reports. As it has been noted, the frequency of my posts (as well as the number of blogs I read) has decreased significantly since I started playing World of Warcraft. Originally I was attributing this entirely to the addictive nature of WoW, but I'm wonder if I'm also slightly bored.
I'm an early adopter type and I'm not asserting here that I represent any normal person. Reflecting back on my personal early days of blogging, there was something nifty and cool coming out every week. Blogrolls, facerolls,Technorati, etc. My traffic was growing, blogs were becoming global, and it was all new, at least to me.
New things continue to be developed, but more and more of the work seems to involve growing pains like scalability, oversized communities and integration of "normal people" as we cross the chasm. Also, the new consumer Internet bubble is attracting attention from non-participant investors. This is an important part of making blogs a truly ubiquitous phenomenon, but it definitely feels more and more like real work.
When I was in Helsinki visiting Nokia a few days ago, I playing with my phone waiting in line and in cabs. It dawned on me that what I really want is better moblogging. Now, when I am in front of a computer connected to the Internet, I'm mostly immersed in IM for business or Warcraft for fun. When I am mobile, I have idle time that I could spend reading blogs and writing to my blog. I guess this is a sign that, at least for me, blogging has moved from my primary online activity to my idle time filler. However, considering how much idle time I have with my phone, I think I could still blog at a relatively consistent rate. Also, I wish there were better ways to read and write when I am with my computer without a connection.

So in just two years Joichi went from vitally needing his morning Technorati-RSS sync to blogging as an interstitial in an otherwise very busy life.
I can relate to that, for it mirrors my own experience - in a reverse kind of way. Like Joi, I’m an early adopter, although I’ve started this blog only recently, and only after much hesitation: because I have been there before and I have learned how interesting and rewarding and a learning experience blogging can be, but also how difficult and demanding and sometimes consuming.
Back in 1996 and 1997, while we were editing the first Swiss news website Webdo, my colleague José Rossi and myself were blogging. The very concept of weblog had not been invented yet, and the tools were not there, but for all intents and purposes we were blogging ante litteram. On the site we had a section called Cyberjournal where we posted regularly (several times a day) snippets of news and links and analysis and images about Internet-related social and technological developments. Another section dubbed The Green Window was a themeblog devoted to the (then very controversial) entry into the Swiss Internet market of the national telecom operator Swisscom (it was still called Telecom PTT). We had no tools and had to code the whole thing by hand, but all the basic components of a blog where there: we posted frequently news and opinions in reverse chronological order, including external links; readers could comment on our posts and on other readers’ feedback through e-mail (we copied/pasted their messages unedited into the page); there was a blogroll; an archive; even permalinks (static HTML pages with fixed URLs). These two “ur-blogs” (both in French) are no longer there: when José and myself moved to other jobs, the site was radically transformed and somehow downgraded and only later we discovered that no copy of v1.0 was kept. The pages are copied in the Internet Archive though, from where I grabbed the two screenshots (click on them to enlarge).
(Nor were we the only ones: Jean-Pierre Cloutier was blogging from Quebec, Justin was already linking, in Geneva Pascal Rossini had developed a pre-blog format called Les Cartons du Web, and many more).
From 1997 to 2001 then, I edited another themeblog, sort of (there was no open comment feature), focused on another Swiss controversy with international ramifications: the holocaust assets. That blog is still archived on my site.
Those were intense years, spent exploring and trying to understand an innovative media space and the new social and cultural reality it was shaping; keeping up with multiplying sources and an expanding network of contacts; trying out new pieces of technology as they came along and designing a couple ourselves; trying to invent a new language and acquire new social-ware skills; working a lot and writing a lot and traveling a lot. Most days started with a “big sync” and continued at the same pace. It was exhausting but also constantly new, stimulating and exhilarating – until tech and business developments started to make it feel, as Joi says, “more and more like real work”, and exhaustion stopped being compensated by the fun.
After I left Webdo, I remained immersed in the Internet world, writing and starting up companies  and working with global organizations, but when three years ago blogs as such started to become popular and significant and people kept telling me that I ought to start one, I couldn’t get myself to do so. My first reaction was rather: “been there, done that, and the fun lasted only for a while”. And then I was offered a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University and moved there and used it as an excuse to affirm my hesitation vis-à-vis blogs. I was following developments in the blogosphere closely, but couldn’t decide myself to open that TypePad account.
Leaving Stanford to return to Europe created a new sense of urgency: I needed better and faster tools to communicate, interact, develop and test ideas with others. E-mail, IM and my modest website (I’m still posting there my writings in languages other than English) weren’t nearly enough. Nor could I satisfy that need through my columns for several publications.
Hence this blog, and wikis for project work, and Skype conference calls, and so on. It feels like a parallel urgency to Joi’s wish for better moblogging.