[2006.11.23]Face value：The universal diarist风靡全球的日记作者

The universal diarist
风靡全球的日记作者
Nov 23rd 2006
From The Economist print edition

Mena Trott of Six Apart is at the forefront of the shift from mass media to “intimate media”
Six Apart公司的Mena Trott正在引领大众传媒走向“私人传媒”。

IT ALL began five years ago with a blog entry about a banjo. Mena Trott had recently graduated as an English major from college and, at 23, was living as an under-employed designer with her husband Ben in San Francisco, passing her time by keeping a personal online diary. Called Dollarshort, it was a blog about her childhood, her pets and that sort of thing. One day, on a girly whim, she wrote that she wanted to buy a banjo but that her husband, ever the “tyrant”, wouldn’t let her. Mena’s friends and family, knowing that “Ben is the sweetest guy in the world”, recognised the humour, says Ms Trott. But all sorts of strangers suddenly blogged back with angry feminist advice, advising her to get a separate bank account, to tell off her bullying husband, and even to leave him. Ms Trott was livid. “Why can’t people take a joke, and who are these people anyway?” she wondered.
故事要从五年前一篇关于班卓琴的博客文章说起。当时Mena Trott刚从大学英语专业毕业，与她的丈夫Ben一起住在旧金山。她的职业是一名设计师，但没多少活可干，就靠在网上写日记打发时光。那个名叫Dollarshort的博客记载了她的童年，她的宠物，等等不一而足。有一天，她突然萌生了一个孩子气的念头，就在日记中说她想买一把班卓琴，可她那位素来“专制”的丈夫不让她买。Trott女士说，她的亲朋好友都知道“Ben是世界上最可爱的小伙子”，所以一眼就看出来她这是在开玩笑。但是形形色色的陌生人却纷纷在她的博客中留言，愤怒地表示男女应该平等，有的建议她单独设立一个银行账户，有的让她教训一下她那横行霸道的丈夫，还有的甚至劝她离婚。Trott女士气不打一处来。她心想：“为什么人们看不出来这是玩笑呢？这都是些什么人呢？”

It was the seed of a profound insight: that the era of mass media was ending and a new era of “intimate media” had begun. Mr Trott had written some software to make it easier for his wife to update her blog, and they realised that other people might find it useful too. It was an instant success upon its release onto the internet in 2001, and the Trotts have since built their company, called Six Apart (because their birthdays are six days apart), into the largest independent provider of blogging tools and hosting services. Ms Trott is Six Apart’s president and public face, while Mr Trott, who is shy and retiring, runs the technical side of things and seasoned executives handle the management. Six Apart’s flagship products, Movable Type and TypePad, are popular among “power bloggers” with large audiences, and its third product, LiveJournal, is big among teenage girls who blog for their friends. Collectively, Six Apart’s products are used by over 30m bloggers around the world.
从此她便开始考虑一个更深层次的问题——大众传媒时代正渐渐远去，新的“私人传媒”时代来临了。为便于妻子更新博客，Trott先生编写了一款软件。他们意识到其他人也会觉得这款软件有用。2001年，这款软件在网上发布并风靡一时。如今，Trott夫妇已经将他们的Six Apart（因为他俩的生日正好相差6天）建设成为博客工具和网络空间租用服务最大的独立供应商。Trott女士Six Apart公司的总裁，负责公司的对外事务，而Trott先生比较腼腆，不善交际，因此负责公司技术层面的工作。公司的运营则由经验丰富的管理人员负责。Six Apart的主打产品Movable Type和TypePad在拥有大量读者的“有影响力的博客作家”中颇受欢迎，而其第三种产品LiveJournal则十分受那些专为朋友写博客的少女们的青睐。全球总共有3000多万博客使用Six Apart的产品。

These days, however, the Trotts are most excited about their newest product, Vox, which was launched last month. For if a blogging service can have a personality, then Vox has Ms Trott’s. Like Ms Trott, Vox is unpretentious and accessible. By contrast with rival services, users need not worry about having to understand technical matters, such as the HTML formatting language in which web pages are encoded, in order to incorporate whizzy features into their blogs. They can upload pictures, video clips and songs with just a few clicks on a simple, colour-coded page. Also like Ms Trott, Vox celebrates the frivolous and mundane. Much of Ms Trott’s personal blog, VoxTrott, is devoted to images of her beloved dog Maddy, while Mr Trott, a dilettante cook, likes to post “disgusting pictures of good food” on his blog. Many ordinary people are scared of blogging because they feel that they have nothing to say, says Ms Trott. So her message is that “mundane is interesting; it’s OK to talk about your sandwich”. To a handful of people in the world it may mean a lot.
然而，这几天让Trott夫妇感到兴奋之至的是他们上个月发布的最新产品——Vox。假如说博客服务可以个性化的话，那么Vox恰好就体现了Trott女士的个性。跟她一样，Vox朴实无华，简单易懂。相比行业对手的服务系统，Vox的用户根本不用掌握复杂的技术（如网页编码用的HTML格式语言）就可以把博客装点得精美且富有特色。他们只需要在一个简洁的用色彩编码的网页上点击几下，就能够上传图片、视频片段和歌曲。还有跟Trott女士一样的是，Vox不放过平凡生活中的一点一滴。Trott女士个人博客VoxTrott中有许多其爱犬Maddy的照片，而对厨艺半懂不懂的Trott先生则喜欢在他的博客中贴一些“令人作呕的美食图片”。Trott女士说，一般人很多都由于觉得无话可说而害怕写博客。因此，她主张“平凡的就是有趣的，就算是谈谈三明治也无妨”。对世界上少数人而言，这也许意味深长。

The other thing that keeps many people from blogging is fear for their privacy, she thinks. Hence the third and most important characteristic of Vox. It is intimate. For every item on Vox—a text paragraph, a photo, a link—bloggers can determine if it is to be public or private and, if it is private, exactly who can see it. Ms Trott, for instance, keeps one part of VoxTrott for communicating only with her mother, who has an insatiable appetite for information about certain minutiae of Ms Trott’s life. She also has a daily “Yay Me Update” just for herself, in which she uploads self-portraits from her mobile phone in order to preserve a chronicle of her life for her descendants—uninterrupted except for that time when she gained a bit more weight than she cared to commit to memory and conveniently forgot to post for a few days.
在她看来，许多人远离博客的另一个原因是他们对隐私问题的担心。由是就要说到Vox的第三个特点，同时也是最重要的一个特点，那就是它绝对私密。针对Vox上的每一个条目——一个段落，一张照片，一个链接，博客作家都可以决定是公开还是保密；如若公开，还可以确切到允许哪些人浏览。例如，Trott女士的博客中有一部分内容是仅供她与母亲进行交流的，母亲对她生活的关怀无微不至。她还建立了一个完全属于她私人空间的“Yay Me Update”栏目，把手机中的自拍照上传到那里，目的就是为了给后人留存一段自己生活的记忆。更新几乎没有间断过，只有在她长胖了一点时，她不愿意把那个样子存入记忆，因此就借口忘记而连续几天都不更新了。

But despite its homely origins Six Apart is ultimately a business, so somewhere in this vision there must be money. The daunting challenge it faces is to “monetise” the product without ruining the feeling of intimacy for its users. Like most online media, Vox is funded by advertising, but “the advertising is so subtle that a lot of users don’t even know where it is,” says Andrew Anker, the product manager for Vox. A blogger might, for instance, write about her favourite novels and include a link to the books on Amazon, a big online retailer. Within a small social circle, such personal recommendations are a powerful form of marketing. If somebody clicks on these links, lands on Amazon’s website and completes a purchase, Amazon will share 7% of the proceeds with Six Apart. Similar arrangements exist with an online video service, and Mr Anker hopes to add deals with online music stores and other partners in future.
虽然Six Apart公司源于家常生活，但它毕竟是一个企业，因而就必定涉及到钱的问题。它现在面对的严峻挑战就是，如何在不破坏其与用户之间亲密关系的前提下，实现产品的“货币化”。Vox与大多数网络传媒一样通过广告获取资金。但是Vox产品经理Andrew Anker说：“广告太不起眼了，好多用户连广告在哪儿都不知道。”比如说，某个博客作者在博客中介绍她喜欢的小说，并加入这些小说指向Amazon网站（一个大型的在线零售商）的链接。这种个人推荐在一个小型的社交圈内可以是一种有力的促销方式。如果有人点击这些链接，进入Amazon网站再买一样东西，Six Apart公司就可以按7％的比例从Amazon利润中提成。类似协议也见于在线视频服务。Anker希望今后与一些在线音乐商店及其它合伙人也开展类似合作。

Putting the “me” into media
传媒要以“我”为本

As a firm, Six Apart expects to break even only next year, and it is tiny when compared with giants such as Google, which has a rival blogging service called Blogger, or News Corp, a media conglomerate that offers blogging as one of many features on MySpace, its social-networking site. So the surprise is how well Six Apart holds its own against these industry titans. For some of the large internet companies, blogging seems “like a checkbox”, says Ms Trott—ie, something to have because it is fashionable, without caring much about it. She and her husband, however, sincerely regard blogging as a way of life.
作为一家公司，Six Apart明年即有望实现收支平衡，但与Google（拥有与Six Apart竞争的博客服务系统Blogger）、News Corp（一个传媒集团，在其社交网站Myspace上提供包括博客在内的众多特色服务）之类的巨头相比，它还很小。因此，Six Apart竟然能与这些产业巨擘相抗衡实在叫人惊讶。Trott女士说，在一些互联网大公司看来，博客“就像是一个‘复选框’”——也就是说选了它不过因为它时髦而已，其实并不多么在乎它。但是，她和她的丈夫却真诚地认为博客就是生活的一种方式。

Her commitment to the social, not just the commercial, potential of blogging has made Ms Trott an unofficial spokeswoman for the wider phenomenon of new media. Ms Trott is 29 but appears even younger; she is currently practising how to speak clearly with new braces in her mouth. And yet she increasingly has the attention of elder statesmen who are baffled by the rise of blogging and need help in “getting it”. At a big conference this year, Ms Trott regaled a large audience of digerati with her family photos and other tales. Spotting Al Gore, “the first person I ever voted for”, in the first row, she turned shy for just a moment. America’s former vice-president then sat spellbound through the remainder of her speech.
博客的前途不仅仅在于商业，还可以延伸至整个社会。致力于挖掘博客发展的社会潜力让Trott女士成了日益普及的新型传媒的非官方代言人。Trott女士今年29岁，但看上去更年轻。目前她正在练习戴着新牙箍清楚地讲话，而且她还引起了一些老资格议员的注意。这些议员对博客的崛起感到困惑不已，需要有人帮他们“了解博客”。在今年的一次大会上，Trott女士展示了自己家庭的照片，讲述了一些家庭生活故事，让台下满座的计算机专家们倍感愉悦。当认出坐在第一排的是Al Gore（“我平生第一次投票选举的人”）时，她几乎没有半点羞怯。那位美国前任副总统当时着了迷似的坐在台下听完了她后面的演讲。