Category: Social Media

It’s Easter morning where I am. The storms of last night were mild in our area, and the sun is up, the birds singing, and a nice breeze blowing through my windows. The trees are mostly green, except for the dogwood, with it’s pink and white dog tooth blooms.

If I were a Christian, I would end my post here, because it is Easter, after all. Oh, I might mention the bunnies running around earlier. Since I’m not a Christian, and weblogging is neither all Christian (or any other religion) nor all based in the US, one can continue on as usual despite this holiday or that. Well, other than one can’t order any camera equipment for this week. (And I so wanted that 600mm.) I wish now, though, that I’d bought a new spring outfit. I always used to buy a light yellow outfit for Easter. Yellow is not my color, but I only wanted yellow for Easter. Go figure.

Sam Ruby pointed to a Matt Mullenweg post titled, The Feed Validator is Dead to Me. It seems that Sam et al at the Validator made a correction in how the case is treated for wfw:commentRSS. This, in turn, led to Matt’s rejection of all things Validator:

Is anyone else sick and tired of the so-called feed validator changing its mind on fundamental issues every other week? I’m sure Sam Ruby and whoever else is still working on the Validator mean well, but the constant ivory tower decisions to change the way it interpets “valid RSS 2.0″ is making it seem more like a political advocacy tool than anything else. Perhaps I should give the benefit of the doubt and “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Whoa! It is just such tirades that make me hesitant about porting back to WordPress. It’s not that the software isn’t good — I like it. Or that the developers aren’t hardworking–they are, and I appreciate their hard work. It’s that Matt has a real strong arbitrary streak himself, all the while that he disdains what he perceives to be an arbitrary streak in others. This inconsistency tends to grip my graw, as we used to say back in the home country.

Hey, I’m all for arbitrary, but not in my tech. I want my tech to be mind numbingly consistent. I don’t want the developers of Firefox’s JavaScript engine to suddenly decide that wouldn’t it be fun to process all math operations in Firefox as base 8 rather than base 10 by default.

A technology validator’s primary purpose is to validate against a known specification or standard: no more, no less. If the specification or standard is open for interpretation, then the results may not be consistent against various implementations. If a feed specification or standard is clearly defined so that there are no ambiguities, then neither Sam nor anyone else can make any form of arbitrary decision as to what the validator will, and will not, accept. There would be no issue of personalities, because either the feed is valid, or it’s not.

It’s the same with code: either a PHP program is written using valid PHP, or it breaks. I would expect that someone who has spent time with WaSP, as Matt has, would understand this one. After all, I seem to remember this organization’s intolerance to Mozilla’s growing pains back in the days when this effort was fairly young. As for myself, I have finally taken WaSP’s message to heart–so much so that I want my syndication feed to be without ambiguities, and valid.

I know, same old story: the syndication ‘wars’ continue, in which case most of you turn away in ennui. The thing is, I don’t think many of you realize how fragile the whole syndication thing is. When you have imprecise specifications, undergoing change from many different players, the whole thing is held together by a thread. The only reason it’s worked to this point is that most feed aggregators include code to handle all the many arbitrary differences. Frankly, who this serves, I have no idea: I think it’s an abysmal waste of development skill and time.

I’m more or less deciding to drop my RSS 1.x feed, primarily because I can incorporate my use of RDF into many other applications. I’ve never thought that syndication was the best use of RDF, and to too many people, it is RDF (as witness WordPress use of RDF to signal an RSS 1.0 feed, rather than rss1, which would be more appropriate). I’m thinking of making my full content Atom feed my main feed and removing the username/password, as some folk have had problems with this. I figure if my content ends up being re-published in its entirety at another site without my permission, I’ll then handle it the way it should be handled: by using my skill with tech to demonstrate to the site the error of its ways.

The Atom feed is the only feed I know of currently being actively supported by an organization outside of this environment. Support for RSS 1.x seems to have died out. RSS 2.0 is doomed to be forever broken because of an ill-advised assignment of the specification to an organization that seems to be indifferent to the problems associated with it. Okay, fine. Atom: one and only.

Still, I’m not sure how redirecting my feed of one type to another will work. Will have to try, see what happens.

But to return to the concept of arbitrariness, when I do have the time to finish porting back to WP, then I know I’ll be committed to spending time having to create plugins countering some of this arbitrariness. That’s okay, I can publish the plugins; a developer likes to see her work used by others.

As for the syndication feed Validator, frequent changes are perhaps not the best approach when it comes to what the Validator will or will not accept–I would suggest those maintaining the Validator consider a Fix Friday, once or twice a month, preceded by a note about what will change. No need to add to the chaos.

Oh and for those of faith: Happy Easter, May your Passover be a happy time with your families.

Just a quick note that coComments now works with my weblog.

Note, though, that editing with my custom comment editing won’t be reflected in the comment that shows up in this service. In other words, coComments is that annoying friend who remembers everything you said–everything you said–when you were blitzed out of your mind at that party you wished you never, ever, gone to. You know the one I’m talking about. People who attended still look at you strangely.

Happy conversation!

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Adam Green has a suggestion for Doc Searls and his quandry about being a gatekeeper:

The answer is simple Doc, just find a good post from a blogger you haven’t noticed before and link to it. You can direct a firehose of traffic to a blog by doing this. On the basis of karma alone it is a good idea. Think about how you would have felt if one of the cool crowd in high school had asked the buck-toothed kid to sit with them at lunch.

Doc is one of the most loyal webloggers I know. As such, he will rarely, if ever, criticize one of his friends. I don’t necessarily agree with this, but I can admire his consistency in his support.

Doc is also willing to link to those who criticize him, and patiently respond to same. I admire him for this. He’s also one of the few A list tech bloggers who will still link to me, and I’ve been critical about his writings for years, so you might say I have a bias in this regard.

But when Doc does link to me, he rarely sends me much traffic. The same can be said for Scoble and Winer and others. In the great scheme of things nowadays, no one weblogger in the tech ranks is really capable of directing that much traffic. There are some in the political sphere, or the heads of the hordes like Boing Boing that might send a lot of traffic one’s way. But the days when the techie A listers ruled the waves are over.

However, even if Doc could direct that much traffic, I would rather he not link me, then to link me because I’m equivalent to the buck-toothed kid being asked to eat lunch with the cool kids. The thought of this makes me feel faintly nauseous.

If I want anything from the A Listers, it’s honesty. It’s following through on their glowing beliefs in this environment. It’s a cessation of the games, and a reduction of the small minded petty meanness that characterizes too many of the A listers (and which makes one realize that perhaps this environment is not so utopian after all).

A Listers: When you make a comment related to something you’ve read one someone’s weblog, link to it. Don’t talk about it in a sideways manner. Don’t wait until someone you approve of writes about the topic and then link to them. Don’t attach ‘nofollow’ or not add a link, because you don’t think they deserve your ‘link juice’.

If one or more people spend a considerable amount of time responding, thoughtfully, to your post, don’t respond only to those who you consider your ‘equal’. Respond to the argument or discussion, not the person. Don’t hold your response to criticism until someone makes it who you consider to be ‘worthy’.

When people are critical, don’t label them with being a bitch, shrill, hysterical, whining (oe whinging), flaming, or any combination of the same. If this environment was full of people who only smiled, who only agreed, who went around as if we’re all partaking of joy joy juice, and nary a harsh word was heard–you wouldn’t be where you are today. You need us. You need us, a hell of a lot more than we need you. Your fans may make you feel good, but it’s your critics who made you famous.

I have no respect for the linking/attention games played and those who play them, and neither should you. When you see this bullshit, call it bullshit. This will do more to ‘tear down the gates’ then begging an A lister, even a nice one like Doc, for a link.

Now excuse me, this buck-toothed weblogger needs to go brush her teeth.

For those of you with coComment, as you’ve found, it doesn’t work at my site. At this time, the coComment folks haven’t released what exactly the software is looking for, so I can’t modify my site to support this concept. I also haven’t finished adjusting all of my software changes into WordPress plugins in order to move back to WordPress, so for now, you’ll have to remember all on your lonesome of you’ve commented here.

Joe Duemer, in a cleverly titled post, tapped me to list out any and all famous people somehow forming decoration in my workspace. I’ve not forgetten that I also have been tapped for 4 things to list my most dangerous idea. All will be answered in one post, the one that is taking me longer than anticipated to write; as is my story with associated photos from the Johnson Shut-Ins trip. My only excuse is that I have been feeling peakly lately, and I’m having to devote most of my energies to work.

I’m also behind on my new development server. The most I’ve done is pick the hosting company, and they’ve installed a basic set of software to get me started. The only page that shows at the moment is the Apache2 welcome page. However, it has a nice shiny installation of PHP5, MySQL 5.0, Ruby on Rails, and a host of other goodies. I should be able to put something useful up. Eventually.

Over the weekend, there was chatter about a conversation index, and how the number of comments you have is an indicator of the depth of the conversation. Frankly, I’m not sure we can have a conversation with our posts and comments, no matter how many people become involved.

When you write a comment to one of my posts, you don’t see me. You don’t know what phone call I’ve just had, or how I’m feeling, or even what necessarily triggers my buttons. You can’t look into my eyes and think to yourself, “Maybe now is not a good time to mention what I’m about to mention”. Conversation isn’t just words, or responses. It’s a whole host of things, such as context, familiarity, surroundings, perceptions, and tone. Most importantly, tone. Whether this tone is conveyed via our voices, or our gestures, it forms a third part of our communication when we have a conversation.

As serendipity would have it, Dave Sifry also released some form of state of the blog report this weekend. He wrote:

We track about 1.2 Million posts each day, which means that there are about 50,000 posts each hour. At that rate, it is literally impossible to read everything that is relevant to an issue or subject, and a new challenge has presented itself – how to make sense out of this monstrous conversation, and how to find the most interesting and authoritative information out there.

…how to make sense of this monstrous conversation… You and I and a thousand or so close, intimate friends are having a conversation. Pity that we can only listen to 846 of each other at any one time. Have no fear, though–we’re tagging more.

The thing is, many of these tags are involuntary–derived from categories found in our syndication feeds. They might be helpful if our conversations consist of each of us talking to ourselves, but I don’t know about us having a conversation with each other. As for interesting and authoritative, according to Google, I’m one of the most authoritative and interesting sources on Dave Sifry–not sure he’d agree with that. I know I don’t agree with him, but I’ll let Ethan and Sir Dave the Slayer of Pomps and Lists stick in the pins by their lonesomes this round.

I thought of conversations last night, and realized that I’ve been doing this now for almost five years–or is it six? I can’t remember anymore–and I can count on my two hands the number of times I’ve had a conversation with the people I’ve met through weblogging. I feel affection, respect, a host of feelings for many of you I’ve known for years–yet we haven’t had, in most cases, one conversation.

Dialogs, debates, discussions, exchanges, quips, repartee, jests, jibes, and jokes, oh yes, all of these. Verbal tears, and written fears and softly typed hopes and dreams; bold anger, and italicized satire, and times when the words become jumbled between thee and me and misunderstandings results. I rather think that you, my fine readers, do a terrific job in my comments–better than the posts many times. But do we have conversations? I don’t know. I think if we did, truly did, I wouldn’t be having this conversation with you all right now.

However, I am tired tonight so perhaps this is nothing more than blather. Or, to quote my friend, Sir Dave, what do I know? I make all this shit up.