Categories
Weblogging

Ethical Committees

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

This is not a good day for my blood pressure.

Catching up on other weblogs, I found a pointer to this at Head Lemur’s weblog:

Nick Denton put up a pleasantly surprising post today, complimenting me for being a “volunteer watchdog” for blog ethics. He proposes Jeff Jarvis and I start a blog ethics committee in order to create some standards in blog advertising. It’s a great idea, a lot of work, and very important to the blogosphere.

So the man that brought us weblogging porn has appointed another person who runs a site called “Blogging Ethics” (and is rather tempermental and contentious to boot) to hook up with Jeff Jarvis, who is famous for protecting Howard Stern, and they’ll all come up with a bunch of ethics we need to live by.

Alan, Head Lemur, responded with:

The implication I see is that bloggers are out of control, have no ethics and need to have a keeper. Because there is no seal of approval or codified vetting process we are by default liars, thieves and if we take money whores.

The issue of the so-called Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing is appearing in an increasing number of conversations lately. Ben Hammersley was the first weblogger I knew of who was paid to write about a product through his sponsorship by Cuban Crafter Cigars, but he’s always been open about this. None other than Chris Locke, aka “Rageboy” just joined the ranks as Chief Blogging Officer for Highbeam Research. Marc Canter also brought this up recently, but I can’t find the link at the moment.

Much of the conversation about WOM comes down to trust–how much do you trust the person you’re reading? I have written recently about my PowerBook and my new Canon Printer, and how much I like both. If I did so and received money from Apple or Canon to write complimentary material, and then didn’t disclose this, this would be a pretty tacky thing to do. Or would it, if my opinion was genuine and everything I said was the truth?

Or does it all come down to how much you trust me? If so, then what does money have to do with it?

Categories
Just Shelley

Accepting death

The Robert Lowell poem Terminal Days at Beverly Farms focuses on the poet’s father’s death, which he dispassionately describes in the poem’s closing:

Father’s death was abrupt and unprotesting.
His vision was still twenty-twenty.
After a morning of anxious, repetitive smiling,
his last words to Mother were:
“I feel awful.”

Loren Webster rejects Lowell’s father meaningless smiles and resigned acceptance of the end, seeing himself fighting that long slow slide into night:

When death finally comes I won’t be greeting it with polite civility (my apologies to Emily). No, I’ll be raging, raging against the dying of the light, not standing around with my “cream gaberdine dinner-jacket,/ and indigo cummerbund sipping an “old-fashioned.”

The Dickinson poem Loren references is her Because I could not stop for Death, which begins with:

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

Rather Loren agrees with Dylan Thomas, who wrote at the death of his own father, Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Three months ago I would have been in complete agreement with Loren, and had even re-published Thomas’ poem here in these pages. However, that was before the death of my own father in the beginning of October; a death in which he did rage against the night. For a time. But it was a hollow victory that lasted only five days, and left behind much devastation in its wake, as all battles tend to do.

I wrote about this in a post, and subsequently pulled the writing, still trying to find a way to deal with his death, and the manner of his going. However, Loren’s post reminded me how difficult Dad’s death was made because I didn’t know what to expect in the end–we never talk about death in anything other than the most poetic terms.

I had assumed that my father would quietly die in his sleep, or be there one moment, lucid and talking, and next his eyes glaze over as he took one last gentle inhale of breath. I expected to see the same dignity and strength in dying that I saw in my father in life. I expected many things, from Loren’s noble rage to Dickinson’s polite and genteel acceptance. I wasn’t expecting what happened.

I decided to re-print the entire post I wrote, including the writing which I had pulled–if for no other reason then a reminder that there is a difference between fighting for life and fighting against death.

—-

In Memoria

I had finally gone through all of Dad’s books and decided which to keep, and which to give away. I called the library, but they weren’t accepted any new book donations until April. The lady I talked to asked what kind of books they were. I said they were mainly mystery and detective novels. She suggested I call the local Veterans hospital and see if they could use them.

The hospital said they’d be grateful for the donation, and I went down to drop them off at the Jefferson Barracks Medical Clinic. The weather was fine today, and the place was very pretty with the old barracks buildings and their peeling paint. I asked the person who helped me unload the books if I could take pictures, but she I better not – the place is also the local Homeland Security office.

The hospital is right next to the National Cemetary and I stopped by it to take photos. There were several funerals underway in various places and I could, from time to time, hear the faint echo of shots being fired. It never fails to move me to see the row after row of white gravestones, especially so soon after my own father’s death. I was grateful for the camera, because through it I could view everything dispassionately. I managed fine up until I heard the single trumpet playing Taps.

The sound brought back the memories I still haven’t resolved yet, of my Dad’s death. Especially the Monday before he died, when I was the only one with him in the early morning when the morphine started wearing off.

Dad was dying of congestive heart failure, and it can feel like you’re drowning at times, which is why he was kept so heavily sedated. When he started to become aware, he began to panic when he had trouble breathing and kept patting at his chest and asked me to help him. The most I could do was ring for the nurse and ask for more sedation.

It was the morning busy time and she was late, and Dad got worse and I finally screamed out “..for someone to come help me, Damn it!”

Several people ran into the room, and one nurse went to get the shot, and a second came in to help calm Dad and me, because by this time I was crying so hard I couldn’t stop. When she left, I sat next to Dad, still crying, telling him how much I loved him.

I don’t know where he found the strength, but he pushed himself up on his left side and somehow brought his arm around me, and dragged himself over to the edge of the bed so he was almost in my arms.

I clasped him tightly, and softly told him that it was okay now, and that it was time to think about letting go; we had been advised to tell Dad this, so he could face the resolution of his death. He held me tighter and said just one word, in a voice that was like that of a child, exhausted and high-pitched with confusion and fear: “No”.

The nurse who went to get the shot opened the door and then stopped in astonishment at what she was seeing. She helped me get Dad back into the bed and gave him the shot. After she left, I told Dad that I loved him again, and he said, so faint I could hardly hear him, “love you, dear”. He then fell asleep, and from there to a coma, and never woke up again.


What price

I sat that last night alone with Dad, as his eyes slowly began to turn a odd color since the eyelids never completely closed. I watched the Travel Channel all night long, and held Dad’s hand and just listened to him breath. For four days, I had sat there and listened to my father breath.

What was the most difficult aspect of Dad’s death is that we could have made decisions to move him to a hospital and given him extraordinary care, rather than keep him in his bed at the nursing home and just provided comfort. If we did, he might have lived longer, perhaps even a few months.

Did we make the right decisions? Did we deny Dad his last chance to rage, rage against the dying of the light? I don’t know, and I never will know.

Categories
Just Shelley

Thanks for the birthday wishes

Many thanks for the birthday wishes. I didn’t have a cake tonight, but I did treat myself to two margaritas when my roommate took me out for dinner. And I’m also treating myself to a whole raft of movies, including some classic sci-fi recommended by a friend.

(Speaking of movies, we watched Shrek 2 tonight. I hope I’m not the only adult that loved Puss n’ Boots in this movie; or laughed themselves silly during the hairball incident.)

It’s odd, but I normally don’t remember dreams quite as vividly as the one I recounted earlier. I can’t help thinking it would make a nice centerpiece to a book, or at the least, a short story. If nothing else, it was better than dreaming about being naked in front of an audience, or showing up for school, not prepared for an important test.

It was a good dream, though. Everytime I think on it, I smile. There was something about the book store and the choice, whatever the choice that had such a positive feel to it. And I can agree with Dave Rogers that all the main characters in the dream could be variations on myself — but the man I’m kissing? That sounds just a little too weird, even for a dream, even for me.

Again, thanks for the wishes.

Categories
Social Media

Choosing to be a comment spammer victim

Liz Lawley was recently the recipient of a comment spamming google bombing attack. What happened is that someone placed comments in several weblogs, signed “Whiny Communist Bitch” and then included a link to Liz’s site.

There are two reasons for this: first, to associate those words with Liz’s site, hence the Google bombing; secondly, as people moved to clear up these comments, they automatically added her domain to their blacklists without checking first to see if it was a legitimate site. Hence, Liz’s domain would be blacklisted if she left comments in other sites.

Unfortunately, this type of attack is extremely easy to perpetuate and we’ve seen them before and will be seeing more of them in the future. I wasn’t surprised by the attack, especially since Liz does teach computer technology (nothing worse than a young, disgruntled and semi-adept student). But I was surprised at some of the responses Liz received in her comments.

Too many people had banned the IP addresses of the person who placed the comment, and then sent the IP address to Liz. This following so many weblog postings about the use of open proxies in order to hide the actual IP address of the postee. Secondly, too many people had moved to ban Liz’s domain without first making even an attempt to verify whether it was a legitimate domain. This following so many weblog postings about the dangers of blacklists, and the need to review all URLs included in comment spam.

Now, it’s true that there might be people in the list who hadn’t read these posts, but I find it more likely that these same people have been exposed to postings of this nature, but they would either skip what they would see to be a ‘technical’ post, because they aren’t technicians; or would only skim it, without bothering to take the time to understand how it relates to them.

I’ve long seen a trend among the non-tech webloggers to either blame the techs for not getting all this right; or to depend on the techs to help them when things stop working. Even when we write post after post about what they people can do to help protect themselves, they resist; the reasons for doing so are less that the technical material is over their head, as they don’t want to waste their time on technical stuff. Yet, isn’t it a greater waste of their time being the victim?

Of course, some of the material we write about is very complicated, and I have no blame for any non-tech who doesn’t want to touch code or the innards of MySQL, or needs help with installations or things that break. But understanding the concept of open proxies doesn’t require a technical background; nor does understanding the concepts behind ill-managed blacklists.

If we who write on these issues aren’t clear enough, we welcome questions and requests for clarifications. But this still implies that the non-techs take the time to read the material–to choose not to be a passive recipient of the whims of malicious people.

There are options such as using hosted technology or turning off comments, and hiring people to help manage your site. These are valid choices and more power to the person who makes them. But for the rest, if you don’t want to continue being a victim, you also have some responsibility to understand both your tool and this environment.

To this end, I’m in the process of re-publishing to the IT Kitchen, several of my writings where I’ve attempted to explain to non-techs how this environment works. Hopefully if the writings aren’t clear, I’ll get asked for clarifications. Or will I get silence as the non-techs skip over something that smacks of the faintly technical, in favor of another lambast at Bush, or cute cat quiz? I guess we’ll see in the next round of comment spam attacks.

I and the other techs will continue to work the issues of comment spam and it’s like, trying to find solutions that make it easier for the end-users. I’ve spent time this week on several different approaches in Wordform, to see if I can prevent automated comment spam posting, which is the most destructive and time consuming type. I am less worried about the individual comment spammer.

In the end, though, I have a feeling all the solutions are going to require equal participation from all, non-techs and techs alike. Personally, I think that Liz’s solution is the one that is most effective: maintaining a sense of both humor and perspective about the whole thing.

I wrote in the missive to Dana Blankenhorn, as detailed in the last post, that when a user is faced with ads in their syndication feed, rather than blame open source and the RSS 2.0 specification, they can exercise their freedom and unsubscribe from the feed. I said that this was the user’s responsibility in the open source equation.

Understanding this environment could also be considered an end-users responsibility, unless they want to give up all technical independence. Or continue to be a victim.

Categories
Connecting

Open source and open choices

Yesterday, Matt Mullenweg posted a link to a weblog entry in the Ziff-Davis weblog Open Source. Matt and others, including myself, wrote some fairly critical material about the post because the writer seemed to confuse open source with syndication feed use:

One problem open source advocates seldom acknowledge is the disrespect many people have toward what’s held in common…Lately I’ve seen my RSS feeds becoming heavily polluted by RSS spam – entries that are just ads, or sets of links that all lead to purchases (on which the spammer gets a cut)…Question is, who polices what no one owns? How can we maintain the cleanliness of the commons against those who don’t share its ethics? It’s a question that has haunted the Internet for 10 years now. It’s a question that, frankly, haunts every open source technology.

The main criticism we had about the writing is that the author seemed to mix up the freedoms associated with open source technologies, with people abusing their RSS syndication feeds, and then pulled these disparate points together into a discussion of disrespect of that which is held in common.

I, like others, wrote a critical comment to the post and was somewhat surprised when the author, Dana Blankenhorn, responded in an email back. We ended up having a very cordial discussion, going back and forth about what each other meant with our writing.

Dana’s concern, and rightfully, is if open source is ‘open’ who controls it and keeps it from chaos? I wrote a long reply about open source and his analogy, and he asked if he could print a shortened version of it online, which he posted today. I said sure, but I’d probably print the full (though edited) writing in a post of my own, which follows at the end.

I did want to say, though, that Dana Blankenhorn responded with a great deal of patience and grace in the face of such overwhelming criticism. Hopefully he’ll be commended for this, as much as he was condemned yesterday for his original writing.

 

I don’t want to take your time, but I want to clarify the points I was trying to make, in addition to what others who work in open source are trying to make. And then I’ll leave you be.

First, let’s separate out discussions of the commons from open source, because the two are not the same. Your example of a commons is a city park that sounds like it’s poorly maintained, and in a community with a lot of homeless. Somewhere in San Francisco, then.

Anyone can access this park, and piss on the grass, sleep on the benches, and drop their garbage on the sidewalk. They can also let their dogs poop and not clean up. Now this all assumes of course that the common community doesn’t pay taxes to hire people to clean, and police to monitor the site, and doesn’t create rules and laws governing the use of the park.

Still, people can pretty much do what they want as long as no police are around.

Returning to the software: contrary to your assumption, open source code is not ‘owned’ by the commons. People can’t just jump into the code and start hacking away.

For instance, your site uses WordPress. This is a GPL licensed piece of code, and you can’t get much more ‘open source’ than GPL, which means anyone can copy the code and make modifications and do what they want with this code. The only stipulation is that you can’t apply a more restrictive license on any code derived from the source.

This sounds chaotic, doesn’t it? I mean anyone, just anyone can hack away at the code. Ohmigod! This is terrible. Quick! Tell ZD that they need to switch to Movable Type before your site gets contaminated with odd functionality!

Seriously, people can’t come in from the street and touch the original codebase much less do anything harmful to it. You see, and this is where your analogy really falls down flat, the code for WordPress is controlled by a small group of developers that can restrict, heavily, who is involved in development on WordPress, and what changes are incorporated into the tool’s codebase. In fact, if anything, this is a problem with some open source projects–too small a group, too much personal ego, can result in too heavy a restrictions on what does and does not happen with future revisions.

Now, what can happen is that if I decide I want to go a new direction with WordPress and it differs significantly enough from the WordPress development team, I can ‘fork’ the code. What this means is that I can grab a snapshot of the code and go my own direction, maintaining my own version of the code. In fact, this is something I am doing–creating a new version of weblogging software called Wordform that will be a fork of WordPress 1.3.

Sure I can copy the WordPress code and hack all I want – but I can’t modify the codebase for WordPress; not unless I can negotiate for the change with the WordPress team. Since my vision for the code differs so much, it’s easier just to fork the code (not something done trivially, believe me, which is why you don’t see this happening that frequently).

This is open source. This is how many open source efforts work. Apache’s a good example of a larger project, with a bigger team–but you still have to follow the rules and ‘prove’ yourself before you’re allowed in to hack the code. And there are Apache architects that strictly control future directions for this tool, which is why it rarely undergoes through major changes. Notice how people are still using Apache 1.3 for the most part? That’s because the Apache team has to move so carefully to maintain faith with their current installed customer base. Heck, Microsoft blew it’s customers away with Longhorn and .NET and did so with a massive amount of arrogance and indifference; that’s why I went from being an author of books about Microsoft technology to only writing about open source: open source maintains better faith with its users.

Now, the same constraints about WordPress are true for RSS 2.0, though it’s released under Creative Commons; you can’t modify the specification and still have it released as ‘RSS 2.0′. You can create a new syndication feed specification, but then you have to convince a million or so people to use it–not trivial, ask the Atom folks.

You’ve said that people can disrespect open source because it’s held in the commons. Rather than your park analogy, open source is more similar to the Zoo here in St. Louis: I have to go during open hours, and I have to follow certain fairly strict rules while I’m there. Yet the Zoo is part of the city’s public trust–that commons you reference.

As for the garbage you get in your syndication feed: the most open aspect of open source is that you have the right to ‘openly’ unsubscribe from the syndication feed that dumps the crap on you. In other words, if you don’t like the park you’re walking in, walk somewhere else. That’s your responsibility as the user in the open source equation.