Max - You wanted to talk about Poetica sometime this week. Let's do it here instead so other folks can join in :)

When I saw their demo at News Foo this weekend I was really tickled. For one, I used to do copy editing while in school, so I have a pretty antiquated appreciation for proofreaders' marks. (The little swirl to delete. Is there anything more efficient but also flourishy than that?)

I also just think there's something to referring back to real-world memes like those and bringing them online. People ask us all the time why we limit participants in Branch conversations, and my answer is always some variant of, "Think about how many people you can have in a real-world conversation."

Thanks for having me here, Libby. Nice use of Branch. ;)

I saw a Poetica demo at the Books In Browsers conference. For the 99.999999% of humans who haven't seen it, it's a website/service made for discussing text that's in process of editing.

The writer pastes text into a page which gets an obfuscated URL. You share that URL with your readers, who can make suggestions. Kindof like a gist with comments. The current constraint—"not a word-processor"—opens up some interesting uses.

This week I used it a couple times to share a short amount of text—copy for an email invite and a blog post—with two outside readers. They were able to point out formatting issues, which I corrected on the page, then exported the text from Poetica.

Libby, you seemed delighted when you saw it. What gave you such a smile and how have you used it so far?

[public disclaimer: I am friends with the makers of Poetica and an advisor on another piece of editing software as well.]

For one, Google Docs is sort of my own personal hell. I really, deeply love editing, and I just find that the Googleization of it really takes all the fun (and heart) out of what I find to be a very intimate and personal thing. But gee is it efficient!

I've also been big on playing by other people's rules lately. It's what I liked about Medium (see tweet), and sort of what I like about Poetica, too, in a way. I'm sort of bored of whizz-bang products that give you every feature you could ever need. I like products that feel like toys and try to delight me, not out-feature 'the other guy.'

My biggest gripes with Google Docs:

1. I can't find anything. Not to nerd out, but their nonsense imaginary filesystem in a web browser is ick. I write myself todo/notes in Workflowy with URLs of gDocs just to keep track of where everything is.

2. I can't work offline or in any other apps. Sometimes I like the focus of iA Writer. Most of the the time I live in Sublime Text.

I keep all All The Things as text/markdown files in a folder on Dropbox. I organize them by filenames and access them through nvAlt.

With Poetica, I find it really simple to take text from any of those, paste them into a temporary draft. Get quick feedback. Delete the draft.

For reference, here's a draft in Poetica. (Please keep in mind it's in alpha/pre-release.)

(True confession, I regularly commit changes in that folder of text files to a private git repo, too.)

Ahhh, that's really interesting.

I've also started to like the concept of "disposable" places on the internet. You can "spin up" a branch, for instance. And then close it and you're done. There's something about carving out a big old chunk of space for yourself on a blog and then going to town posting that seems a bit silly now, when it's really just some measure of identity, some level of ownership (e.g. my link and no one else's until I show them), and a bit of space that you need.

...Subcompact internetting!

Temporary spaces....

I've had a wish for a while of making quick places with URLs (like a bit.ly link or a cl.ly image link, you know?) for the purpose of a conversation, and then deleting the URL to erase the trail and the comments. Does that make any sense?

One aspect of the web is an illusion of space. I think it was Nathan Heleine who said that the totally public and totally private spaces have already been built and the next wave of internet making is of the semi-public and semi-private (ala Chris Alexander).

That's why I harp so much about private Branches and limiting invited participants' ability to invite more people.

Do you use reading.am, Libby?

I do not use reading.am — but you do, don't you? What's it for?

And that's interesting re: semi-public/private. I sort of love but don't get, "One aspect of the web is an illusion of space." Link me out to thinks I should be reading?

# Reading
Reading.am is a way to keep a trail for yourself and for others of where you've been on the web. Of articles you read on the web, with a single (chronological) thread or trail.
example: reading.am

It interjects some javascript and adds some functions onto articles you read. One (of many) interesting facets is seeing other readers when you're on an article. And leaving notes for yourself that are also public there. Highlights. Sources. Comments.

Different than commenting on the page itself. More like backchannel and marginalia than discussion or haterade.

Part of that is the limited audience. Part is the shape of the textboxes, no?

But I think a lot about private/public/semi-private/semi-public. Much of it I crib from Chris Alexander, in particular the book he made with Serge Chermeyeff "Community and Privacy" 

In their attack on suburbs and modernist slum architecture (Le Corb, etc.), they presented a model of spaces for conversation: Bedroom, Living Room, Porch, and Avenue.

Each has some number of thresholds away from the street. On Branch, I feel like I'm speaking (a little loudly) on the subway. Poetica feels more like sitting at a table and tilting one's laptop to someone for an over-the-shoulder read.

Thanks for the invite Lib. I've been thinking a lot about writing lately. Specifically about how concise writing leads to clearer thinking.

Paul Graham's Age of the Essay got me moving, but this presentation really sealed the deal.
ai.uga.edu

A few ideas that stick out:

Great writing is re-writing.

Time taken to process an n-word sentence is n3. Cut the sentence in half and you make it 8 times easier to read. (Maybe)

You don't really know what you're thinking until you try to articulate it. Sloppy writing is thus the result of either laziness or sloppy thinking.

What I like about Poeti.ca is the idea that a comfortable, casual editing environment could incentivize clearer thought for a wider audience.

To go further on this, and relate it to Max's point...

I feel like in an in person conversation and in something like Gchat, speed is favored over clarity and conciseness. What is nice about this kind of flow can expose some new ideas--you can bring up semi formed ideas that aren't fully articulate with hope that the other members can help flush them out for you.

I like Max's analogy of subway to kitchen table. And I like the idea of ideas sharpening each step of the way. Poeti.ca feels like the first step before Branch posting, maybe branching is the step before writing a stand alone essay.

On the topic of spinning up these semi-private/semi-public spaces for ourselves, Josh actually just started a branch about forgoing digital possessions. Should be a good thread.

I just thought to ask... are all Poeticas (?) public?

At the moment, they're public-but-with-url-obfuscation, which I'd classify as semi-public.