A Chat With Steve Champeon

January 3, 2000

The News & Observer
By Christina Dyrness; Staff Writer

On this day in 106 B.C., Marcus Tullius Cicero, the great Roman orator, was born. So we thought we'd sit down for a chat with a great online orator, Steve Champeon. Champeon, a senior technical consultant at the Web services and design firm hesketh.com/inc. in Raleigh, is known on the Web and on a bunch of e-mail lists as a source of witty commentary, technical expertise and the occasional long-winded rant (in fact, he dashed one off to me right after our chat!) Seems like the perfectCicero for the modern age, right? Well Champeon came up with his own link to history, the birth date (in 1892) of the late J.R.R. Tolkein, author of "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings." Read on to see why he thinks that's more appropriate.

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Q. I pitched this to you as a celebration of the birth of Cicero, since you're a great Web orator. You countered with the suggestion of a celebration of the birth of Tolkein because of his creation of imaginary worlds. Tell me why you think that's more fitting?

A. The way I look at it, ever since computers were networked you've seen people coming together from all over the ends of the network and creating these spaces that don't have much bearing or resemblance to the real world. Look at what Tolkein did with "The Lord of the Rings." He created this other world and he always insisted dwarfs weren't Danish and elves weren't the French, that they were just dwarves and elves. There was no need to map them to the real world; he created something else.

Q. So you think the Web is like that.

A. Not so much the Web per se. Much of the interaction I have tends to take place over e-mail mostly because I don't have enough time to search the Web looking for things. ...

But the sort of community that forms around that or a list or a newsgroup, there's a different set of rules. Like, I'm sure you know about flaming. You end up with something where the rules form based on some sort of environment. For example, a lengthy rant may not be acceptable at a dinner party or a cocktail party but it's much better suited for a list community where people understand that you may be posting at 3 a.m. when you're all jazzed on coffee and just have something to say.

It's usually an unspoken set of rules governing interaction. ... There's this one list I'm on, the WWW artists consortium, which is based in New York, and people on that list will just bitch all the time. But you take a list like NoEnd, based in San Francisco, and it's much more crunchy-granola. People are posting poetry and trip reports; it's much more reflective of Northern California tolerance.

Q. How many Web lists communities are you involved with these days?

A. (He laughs) Well there's the WWWAC list, NoEnd - those are pretty much Web design lists. Then there's WebDesign-L, which we run.

Q. We meaning hesketh.com?

A. Yes, we host it. Then there's a list about dynamic HTML and a list that a guy named Michael Sippey started up called The Obvious List. He was getting his MBA at the Haas Business School at Berkeley and started a Web site, theobvious.com, and started writing essays for posting on the site and people would e-mail him with comments and there were a few of us whose comments he welcomed or was interested in ... Now there's about 12 of us on the list and it's a place we all hang out.

Q. It's interesting that you would say that this list is a place you all hang out when it's people you never see.

A. Well, this is probably a poor example. But say you have a favorite television show, "Frasier" for sake of illustration. You look forward to seeing it, you watch it every week and it's sad but people develop strong relationships with the characters. I used to watch "Cheers" all the time and I remember when Coach died there was a real sense of loss. With a list, it's not a lot different - once a week you check in ... you keep up to date on what people are doing, but there's also a lotmore personal sense about how they're feeling and where their lives are going. A lot of times I know more about the friends I have online than the people around me.

Q.Are you more comfortable communicating via e-mail than by phone or in person?

A. I would say no. I'm pretty good at communicating in person. But with e-mail there is the luxury of being able to take time to - not that you always do - compose a thoughtful response or work up a heated invective. There's an immediacy of communication but people are able to filter themselves.

Q. So how did you get started with this kind of community?

A. Well in 1991, I met Heather [Hesketh] while I was at Syracuse University and we would send each other e-mail. And then in 1993, when I moved down here I had an actual live Internet connection and I found this UseNet Group that was based on - do you read science fiction?

Q. Not much, no.

A. Well, Spider Robinson wrote about an imaginary bar called Callahan's that had this tradition that you can stand up and make a toast. And the owner owned a glass company or something because after your toast you would throw your glass in the fireplace. Well, you talk about Cicero - people would post on this group that was based on that and they would choose a name to be referred to as. ... This one guy was called Speaker to Minerals, and Speaker would stand up and lift his glass and offerthis toast and reel off a poem and people would respond and congratulate him or post a story in exchange. ... I just read the newsgroup for a month. But one day things weren't going well at work and so I did a post, I guess it was kind of juvenile, complaining about the job and everything in my life and I couldn't believe how many responses I got from people who said "Oh, I've been there" and offered support. It was just strange.

Q. You spoke at a Web conference in Boston last month, right?

A. Yes.

Q. About what?

A. I was just pitching the book. (Champeon recently wrote a page-turner called "Building Dynamic HTML GUIs.") I'm going to be talking at another conference in Chicago in March. I'll be doing two talks, one for the Dynamic HTML user interface, which is what I presented on in Boston. And for the other I'm going to do a panel discussion to talk about how you build online communities.

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