Category: Weblogging

Are you interested in knowing why I started weblogging? I tried the technology with both a Blogger and a Manila Site weblog, and wasn’t that interested at first. It wasn’t until a posting at Scripting News and resulting discussion and pulled content associated with Meg Hourihan that I noticed the power of the interactivity of weblogging.

I found this post at Meg’s weblog that talked about comments in Dave’s weblog. I hope Meg doesn’t mind, but I’m copying the pieces that caught my eye and pulled me in:

Dave’s spouting some sexist drivel on his site today, which I’d point you to but he’s removed most of it. There was nice crock of shit about men being better suited to programming than women and several other comments that riled my blood. All that remains is an important observation regarding the percentage of women in attendance at tech conferences, which is always so out of wack. And it’s something that really irritates me, not only the lack of women, but especially the lack of female speakers at most events.

Dave’s suggestion is to pair conferences (“A librarian conference at the same facility as a developer conference. They’d get better software and we’d get more users and kinder feedback?” [Kinder feedback? Is that because women are so sweet and nice?]) so there’d be more “female energy.”

This is in reference to a posting that Dave cleaned up considerably and then re-released as an essay — sans the suggestion about pairing the librarian and software developer conventions. And some of the more interesting bon mots about women in programming.

I wrote an email to Dave at that time taking exception to what he said. I wonder if he remembers my email? I also realized at that moment if I had a weblog, I could respond to Dave’s comments on my own, for everyone to see.

Today, Dave writes:

Women are organizers. Everywhere you go there are organizations of women doing things, planning stuff, making the world work. Men aren’t like that…

…Men just won’t work with others, men or women. We’re solitary beings. Yeah we like to get laid (or mothered), that’s why we have anything at all to do with women, in our natural unevolved state (evolved men, like women see the value in all points of view). Now women, while they organize, are not win-win beasts, they compete with each other viciously.

The person who writes this is a leading figure in technology. He’s the father of XML-RPC as well as one of the leading contributors to SOAP. Add to this his being a speaker at conferences, quoted by mainstream journals on a fairly regular basis, and his influence with Scripting News. And read these words and Dave’s essay again. Particulary the essay. Particularly the first few paragraphs.

There is sexism in every damn field that exists. There is sexism that works against women and sexism that works against men. Don’t believe me? Just have a chat with guys who are attending nursing school or staying at home to take care of the kids and house while the wife works.

Luckily, for the most part, sexism is not tolerated and managers and co-workers would be appalled at it’s application. But it’s there.

Fact of life: In today’s colleges there is most likely 10 men for every woman in any of the hard sciences. I’m not talking organic science, I’m talking about hard sciences such as physics, engineering, math, and computer science. If I’m wrong in this, prove it to me. Tell me about this class or that class in the hard sciences that has even a third attendance by women.

I could give examples of sexism — discrimatory and detrimental sexism — that I’ve encountered in my profession, but that’s not really the issue. The issue is whenever you have any field that has such hugely disparate representation by one sex or the other, as the computer sciences are, then the people who are in the minority will always be at a disadvantage to the people who are in the majority, no matter how tenuous that disadvantage is within any one environment or other.

And in a very, very tough market, any disadvantage, no matter how small, can make a difference between working…and not.

Damn it, Mike! After I did my last posting I thought I would do a little weblog trolling and there it is, another Mike Golby classic. Yet more excellent writing mixing humor and philosophy with nibbles and bites of life in South Africa. What are you? Some kind of bottomless good writing machine?

Unless you start slacking off, I’m going to come down there and kick your butt.

-earlier-

First of all, I did not elope with Tutor. I was too tall and he was too short and he had this thing for cherry lollipops that was a little too kinky for my blood, and so on and so forth. Besides, it was just a summer thing…

Well, damn. I wasn’t going to bore you all with details of the Trials and Tribulations of Burningbird, at least until some things get resolved. But, after seeing weblog after weblog filled with glowing cries of joy based on Userland’s adding RSS titles, links, OPML, and what not to Radio, I figured that my weblog will at the least be a change of pace.

(Come to think of it, there are all these Radio weblogs spending much of their time extolling Radio features. Might as well staple a Userland ad to your butts, people. At least then we’ll be spared some of the noise when you sit down.)

On to the Trials and Tribulation:

Connected up with a terrific person at General Hospital and she found me a physician. I see him as well as getting several tests performed on the 3rd of April. The nurse agreed with me in that I have the symptoms of a person with an umbilical hernia…at best. If it isn’t a hernia it could be a couple of other things that I would rather not contemplate. Regardless, I have to go into clinic and hospital for ultrasound and possible surgery.

(If it is hernia, how did I get it? Well, you see I have this huge mattress and it needs to be turned every few months and … well, you get the idea.)

I am in a world of hurt and that’s making me cranky — one reason I was going to take a break from weblogging. However, I’ve decided to use the crankiness to good effect and write Scathing Weblogs, instead. Warning: if you want sweetness and light within a weblog for the next couple of weeks, I suggest you go check out some other weblog that features a lot of cute kitten pictures or something. The best I can do is this.

I have been feverishly sending out job applications — permanent and contracting — all over the place and had one whole phone call, today. One whole phone call. That’s one. 1. And it was for a 4 week gig to port an Access database to Informix. The only problem is, I haven’t used Access or Informix for years.

I am broke. I need a job. I don’t give a rat’s ass if I haven’t worked with these particular database systems in a few years. Gimme the job!

No go.

I also finished my corporate tax filings for the US and for Massachusetts and California states today. What a pain in the friggen butt! Why don’t they just speak plain English on these forms:

How much did you make?

Send us all of it.

You know if webloggers blogged in a manner similar to how the tax forms work, our weblogs would look something like the following:

I have this great story. See AccordianGuy for the start, unless your weblog start day was before June, in which case you’ll want to go to Karl’s weblog. However, before going to this weblog, you need to check your eligibility at Eric’s, first.

At Eric’s: Please see Phil’s weblog — he has a cute kitten story. Then access Elaine’s header for directions in how to proceed. But you’ll need to go to Liane’s to find out how to access Elaine’s weblog. And use the Section Al78u8o Ref YYFN instructions (as defined under weblog law dated 1987) at Victor’s to find out what day it is. If it’s not Tuesday, disregard previous instruction.

Whatever you do, don’t go to this weblog or you’ll come away with a compulsion to staple an ad for Radio 8.0 on your butt.

Hi kids. Friends. Strangers who just happen to be wandering by and looked in.

Due to a set of circumstances that, for once, I’m not going to bore you all with, I’m taking a break from the weblog.

Love, hugs, and kisses to my virtual neighbors, The Plutonians. Note new members in the neighborhood — Captain Blowtorch aka Hunt for Happy Tutor, Transcendental Petroglyphs, Kipling’s If (your blog’s been exposed Alistair), Steven’s, and Gretchen Pirillo.

Stop by, say Hi, take them a casserole, drop a lascivious comment on the way out.

Back soon.

The Bird that Burns

I really needed a light diversion today….

It started with the stark words of Farewell at the former happy home of Happy Tutor.

Then, odd little entries began appearing in weblogs.com:

“Hunting the Happy Tutor”

All leading to a new weblog site at www.wealthbondage.com, under the control of a Captain Blowtorch. And within this new weblog are postings about the destruction of Wealth Bondage and the burning of the company headquarters, as well as the hunt for Happy Tutor and his aid.

Finally, tonight, we read that the previous members of the Wealth Bondage/Happy Tutor blogroll will soon be contacted — for what nefarious reason we shudder to think.

On hearing this, a member of said blogroll was heard to say:

My name is on that Blogroll. Should I trust that Captain Blowtorch will be lenient (since I was a recent addition)? Or should I pray instead that the Tutor and his assistant, Mr Dick Minim, will prevail and that I will be allowed to return to my role as an unassuming youth seeking instruction with humility, by which means I may hope to gain good fortune.

Hmmmm. Unassuming youth. Unassuming youth?

Unassuming. Youth. And humility?

Me thinks we’re too late — the hapless blogrolled person has been taken over by a pod person.

-earlier-

Mike Golby has written an important essay today in response to one that Meryl wrote earlier.

Brilliant writing and a very difficult subject.

Update Posting wasn’t pulled, it was a blogger problem. I’ve been having the same problems myself lately. Gladly, the link’s been restored.

-earlier

A bright moment for today — Allan Moult is back online with G’Day Cobbers again!

Stop by. Say hi. Bring him a pie and tell him that you missed him.

Welcome back, Allan!

(Thanks to Steve for spotting Allan’s return.)

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I own the Google results for add Morpheus node. I found this out when I started getting several Google search hits for the combination, all going to my now defunct TechBlog. And by putting these words into the Burningbird weblog, I’ve most likely “stolen” ownership of the search phrase from the TechBlog weblog — Burningbird is a higher Google rank than TechBlog.

We say that Google is weblogging’s best friend because we rely on it to find information tucked away in weblogs; Information we wouldn’t normally find without a powerful search engine. However, in my opinion, Google fails with weblogs. Case in point is my owning the phrase add+morpheus+node.

If you come to my weblog looking for information about adding a Morpheus Node, well, you’re going to be in for a disappointment. I have absolutely no useful information about adding a Morpheus node. The only reason I own the term is that I accidentally used the words “add” “Morpheus” and “node” within a couple of different weblog postings within the same page. And now I’m getting hits for this from Google.

If you want to own the phrase at Google, go ahead: add the words to your weblog. I won’t mind. Owning this phrase in Google adds absolutely no value to my weblog. And once you own the phrase, then what? More hits? You’ll get better webstats and a higher position in whatever buzz sheet you’re on?

That leads me to another piece of technology closely associated with weblogging — web statistics.

If I write about something I think is interesting and a lot of people link to me because they agree with me, then my web stats reflect this interest — an automated pat on the back so to speak. If I persist in writing interesting things and people continue to link to me and I achieve a nice steady flow of visitors then again, I’ve gotten another nice little automated pat on the back from my stats.

Get enough people and I suppose I could sell popup ads and drive away all the nice people who came in the first place.

Web statistics provide useful information only within the norm — once an extraordinary event occurs, your stats are misleading as well as being misinformative.

Remember back when googlewhacking was the Meme or the Minute? It seemed like everyone was into this, and everyone was trying to steal Googlewhacking buzz. You couldn’t visit a weblog that didn’t have “googlewhack” in it somewhere. The end result is that your weblog gets buzz from Google for “googlewhack”. Wow.

Now that googlewhacking isn’t the buzz generator it once was, the hits based on this term have stopped or slowed down. No value added.

You can’t hold the people who come to your site because of the buzz — you can only hold them if they come to your site in a spirit of exploration that extends beyond the madness of the moment. If they come only for the buzz, they’ll grab it and leave.

Bascially, web statistics are another technology that fails within weblogging because other than providing some fun feedback, statistics are too easily manipulated by transitory influences such as minute memes, or temporary linkage from a popular web site or weblog based on a specific posting, to be truly useful.

This discussion about Google and web statistics and technology and weblogging is ultimately leading up to the discussion on yet another technology and its importance within weblogging — RSS. A thread on this technology started last week and will continue in the days and weeks to come because in some ways, RSS is the tip of the iceberg in our understanding of how much influence technology has on weblogging.

Is it was possible to combine weblogging and RSS? My first reaction — being the good geek that I am — is to say that, of course. After all, RSS is nothing more than another associated technology. However, after reflection, I’m beginning to question my original viewpoint. In fact, as with Google and web statistics, I think that RSS is ultimately another technology failure when it comes to weblogs.

In today’s posting Jonathon, who is also following the RSS thread, says:

When Meryl (amongst others) told me that the previous incarnation of my weblog (white text on a dark gray background) was painful to read, I redesigned the site. I don’t see the RSS issue any differently. Now I’m writer, editor (that’s a problem yet to be addressed), and publisher too. The imperative hasn’t changed: I want to attract readers. (I know that Meryl does too.) I believe RSS can help me with that, and see it as just another way of “letting other people know… that [I’m] writing something worth reading.

Can RSS let people know that Jonathon Delacour’s weblog has something worth reading?

Take a look at a RSS newsfeed that’s not based on a subscription model, such as the weblog category feed at NewsIsFree, or at O’Reilly’s Meerkat. Jonathon’s excellent content has as much chance of being noticed in this undifferentiated flow as I do being picked out in a crowd of people as the next James Bond Girl. Better, if he puts the words sex, Mac OS X, or Microsoft into the RSS description, with appropriate HTML tagging to make the words stand out. Or uses an outrageous title such as “Technology fails with weblogging”.

RSS newsfeeds are a terrific way of getting news headlines, but they’re not a great way of discovering new weblog content unless the weblog is nothing more than a source of unique news or accidentally stands out in same way. Even if we follow Jon Udell’s Heads, decks, and leads approach to structuring what shows in an RSS news aggregator, ultimately the information all blends into one amorphous pile of effluvium.

Jon’s heads, decks, and leads works for traditional journalism because traditional journalism works within a finite environment. Weblogging is an infinite stream of new content with no beginning point, no ending point, and a hell of a lot of noise in the middle. Modifying the RSS to follow traditional journalism’s principles of structure fails within weblogging because of very reason that Jon say’s we need this — there are too many weblogs, updating too frequently, and the number is only going to increase. The RSS feed becomes nothing more than weblogs.com, with a lot of annoying noise attached.

As for subscription RSS — pull the weblog content out of the weblog and you’ve lost the context of the weblog. Good words or not, you’ve lost the community associated with the posting, and therefore you don’t really get the best that the weblog has to offer.

Google, weblog statistics, RSS. If these fail, then what kind of technology works for weblogs?

That’s easy: it’s called a hypertext link. Simple, easy to use, and powerful beyond it’s complexity.

Wielded within the context of a weblog posting such as this, a hypertext link introduces you not only to the content, but also the context of that content. When you visit the content through the link, you stay to read the content because you didn’t arrive at it based on some accidental combination of words or because you closed your eyes and clicked on a steady stream from a news aggregator.

If you like what you read and link to it within your own weblog, you annotate the link with your own thoughts and effectively create new context for the posting, one that will appeal to your weblogging circle. The result is that you open a path to that weblog for someone who links to you, and the web of discovery continues, all through something as simple as a hypertext link.

Ultimately, any technology that doesn’t have human interest and intelligence as core to its implementation is going to fail within weblogging, because weblogs are a community, not separate aggregable pieces of unrelated information. We’re not headlines within a new electronic form of journalism or isolated pockets of data accessible via search engines; we’re members of clans sitting around St. Elmo’s fire, exchanging tales and stories, and getting to know each other in the process.