Category: Weblogging

Categories
Weblogging

Silly words

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

During the weekend, much froth was expended on the concept of so-called spamming weblogs, or splogs. Tim Bray writes, Ladies and gentleman, I think we have an emergency on our hands. Chris Pirillo writes that …99% of the blogspot.com domains *I* see are from spammers.

Yet, what we’re finding is that these ’splogs’, a silly word if there is one, are not as much of an impact as one would think. I know I haven’t been troubled by them, and neither have others. As Roger Benningfield wrote:

I have “ego search” feeds set up with all the popular services, and while they return a lot of useless stuff in terms of duplicates and what-not, I only see splogs appear once a week or so. And even though I use Google dozens of times a day, I’ve never once clicked through to a splog.

So my guess is that splogs are really only a problem for big-flow bloggers… people whose names or pet projects are well-known, and thus ideal targets for splogging. While I sympathize with such folks (I mean, who likes spam?), it might be a bit much to expect Google or any other company to shut down their services to make life easier for what is ultimately a handful of inconvenienced A- and B-listers.

However, many of the techs are reacting, including filtering Blogspot domains out of their search lists, or even their tools (in the case of IceRocket). Doc Searls writes on monocultures and in the same breath, talks about how the tech needs to change:

I believe links are devalued because Google has become a monoculture, both as a search engine and as an advertising system. Blog spammers, or sploggers, are taking advantage of that monoculture in the same way boll weevils take advantage of a cotton field.

…

But is any of it enough? I don’t think so. The bigger question is, Can anything be enough to thwart a blight in a monocultural environment?

The real answer to the link devaluation problem has to come from outside Google. We need polyculture: for search, for advertising, for everything. In its absence, we get some fine but isolating services. And blights that take advantage of that isolation.

Technology does not become a monoculture, but technology can reflect a monoculture. As such, those who benefit from, and help nurture, the monoculture are ultimately the ones who are adversely impacted when others learn to exploit it. As such, when it comes to this new ‘blight’ on the face of weblogging, the ones most impacted are the ones most responsible.

Categories
Weblogging

How delightful

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

To find that I suck at weblogging. I post when I want, on what I want, do not have a photo, sometimes have an ‘about me’, and sometimes don’t and I think we can safely say that I’ve lost employment opportunity because of what I write. More than once, most likely.

My titles are bizarre, I don’t point out my ‘hits’, I rarely link to my old stories, and sometimes I use full names and sometimes I don’t. I also don’t use ‘permalink’ to mark same, and though I do have my own domain, I find Nielsen’s comment, Having a weblog address ending in blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. will soon be the equivalent of having an @aol.com email address or a Geocities website: the mark of a naïve beginner who shouldn’t be taken too seriously, to be elitist and foolish, considering that there are many, many weblogs on Blogspot much more popular than his. Personally, I find ’splogs’ to be a refreshingly honest counter-point to this crap.

Categories
Connecting Technology Weblogging

Neighborly news

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out Jerry’s electric car weblog, give it a glance. In the weblog, Jerry is chronicling the process of converting a gas burning Ford Probe into a sleek, clean, electric car.

Jeneane was on the radio today talking about blogging. Nifty Jeneane. Now, we gotta get you off of Blogspot.

Sheila Lennon writes about Sinead O’Connor’s new reggae focused album. I really like reggae, and I appreciate O’Connor’s conversion to the Rastafarian belief, but what she sings is not reggae. It may be the words, it may be the notes, but it isn’t reggae.

Sheila also mentions that Carly Simon–the lady in the gauzy, see-through hippy dress who sang the weblogging anthem decades before weblogging itself was invented–has turned 60 and released a new album. It is also a disappointing bust. I like the type of music, but she doesn’t have the voice to do it justice.

Carly Simon. Brings back memories. Decades ago she was an earth child/sex kitten with a sultry, folksy voice–not an easy combo of image and tone. I remember once buying a see-through dark green patterned gauzy peasant blouse to wear, trying to capture a little of that Simon persona. Every boy I knew back in the early 70’s was in love with Carly Simon. Yup, many a boy fantasized over one or the other of her album covers.

Why, one such boy might have been Dave Rogers, who just returned from a class reunion. Dave points out a the new anti-tech column at Wired. In it, the author, Tony Long, writes:

Anything that diminishes the value of a single human being poses a threat to a rational, humane society. When technology can cure a disease or help you with your homework or bring a little joy to a shut-in, that’s great. But when it costs you your job, or trashes the environment, or takes you out of the real world in favor of a virtual one, or drives your blood pressure through the roof, it’s a monster.

I can agree with the author, but I’d have to add a caveat that it isn’t the technology or even the technologists who are the monster. Follow the promises scattered like so many broken bits of white plastic until you bump up against those with a gleam of silver and gold in their eyes if you want to see the many headed hydra of tech. Still, this promises to be a very interesting column–if only it had a syndication feed, so that I could read it on my computer while I’m at the coffee shop talking on my cell, all the while eying the freaky poet chick and thinking I should get a picture of her for my blog.

Speaking of local hangouts, Karl has written a thoughtful piece about his hangout at PhillyFuture and what he’d like to see in the future for the publication, but he can’t do it alone. Community sites need community.

Well, you do unless you have an aggregator. Oh, and comments. Trackbacks, too. Wait a sec–don’t forget the wiki. And you’re not hip if you don’t do OPML. By the way, is that iPod of yours really six months old? And it still works?

Categories
Weblogging Writing

Doppleganger

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Through the various link services, last week I found that my RSS entries were being published to a GreatestJournal site. I’d never heard of GreatestJournal, and when I went to contact the site to ask them to remove the feed, there is no contact information. I did find, though, a trouble ticket area and submitted a ticket asking the site to remove the account. The following is the email I received in return:

Below is an answer to your support question regarding “/RSS feed on GJ”
(http://www.greatestjournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=22973&auth=xnjd).

FAQ REFERENCE: Can I edit or delete a syndicated feed?
http://www.greatestjournal.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=135

Dear MS. Powers,

Your RSS feed is open for use on your website, which means that the user in question does NOT violate your copyright.

You might wish to take your feed down if you don’t want people to use it.

GJ Abuse.

_________________
NOTICE: This correspondence is the intellectual property of GreatestJournal & may not be reproduced in any form, electronic or otherwise, without the express written permission of GreatestJournal. Any reproduction of this correspondence on GreatestJournal itself, with or without this notice of copyright, may be grounds for the immediate suspension of the account or accounts used to do so, as well as the account or accounts to which this correspondence was originally sent.

Normally I won’t publish a private email without permission, but I found the company’s disclaimer on intellectual property and the email response to be particularly disingenuous, considering the nature of my request. Perhaps the company will delete the user account since I am publishing the response. Regardless, this is yet another reason not to provide full content within RSS.

First, a clarification: syndication feeds are NOT meant to be republished other than for personal use. I do not provide a syndication feed so that you can duplicate it in your weblog or site in its entirety. This would be no different than using a screenscraper to scrape my web pages and then duplicating them elsewhere. If a person specifically likes an item, or wants to comment on something I write, and quotes a post, then there is a human element involved in the effort and the use is selective; it is not a blanket replication of material, just because technology has made this blanket replication easy.

I’ve had my syndication feeds republished elsewhere, but never as anything other than a feed. There were no separate comments attached; nor name given that implied I created the site.

danah boyd ran into something of a similar nature recently when she found a weblog that was created from a mashup of several different weblog entries. I gather in weblogs like the one she points out, the results are based on searching on specific terms and then pulling together the returned bits from the search engines. A good example of this is a second post where one can see that “star” was the term used in searches.

There is little I can do about my writing being scraped and merged into a hodge podge of posts at some fake weblog; but there are things I can do about my syndication feed. I’ve blocked the GreatestJournal web bot so it can’t access the syndication feed. I’ve also returned to feed excerpts. An unfortunate consequence of this, though, is that when I link to other sites, these links weren’t showing up in any of the aggregators, such as IceRocket or Bloglines.

To counter this, I’ve gone to a rather unusual feed format: encoded to allow HTML, and with a linked list of references from the article. I use RDF to maintain this list of links, which also means that semantic web bots can easily find and consume this data (recognizing it as external links through the use of the SeeAlso relationship). I’m also most likely going to change the print out of this data to use microformats so that bots that prefer microformatted data can also easily consume the list.

Currently at Burningbird, I’m using my SeeAlso metadata extension to maintain these manually, but I’m working on a plugin that should be compatible with WordPress and Wordform, and which automatically scarfs up hypertext link marked as external links and stores the data into RDF files for each page (along with other metadata for a specific post). A second plugin than outputs the list and also the links manually input using the SeeAlso extension (which has already been converted into a metadata extension for WordPress); a third plugin does the same for syndication feeds. You can see the progress of this at my Plugins workspace. As you can see, it’s still a work in progress. Right now, I’m working on a way to access the current linked list count so that new links from an edited post start at the right number.

Categories
Weblogging

Dropping Fast

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Thanks to a note from a friend, I found out that in the last week or so, I’ve lost several hundred links and several hundred points in the link race at Technorati.

I guess I had my 15 minutes of, well, I couldn’t call it fame. What could we call it? Dubious distinction of being a now smaller blob in a small, finite, and rather arbitrarily controlled world of other blobs? Or as Sally Fields would say:

You don’t like me! You really don’t like me!

Sorry, having a bit of fun.

Anyway, I’m sure to drop even further in points once I figure out how to respond to something like Recovery 2.0 which is being held in San Francisco, as part of O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference.

In the meantime, a couple of other photos of Cairo, which is 652 miles from New Orleans. What’s interesting is that Cairo’s demographics reflect those of New Orleans, though at a much smaller scale: 1/3 of the people live below the poverty line; blacks make up the majority of the population; it is dependent on the whims of the Mississippi; it has been slowly dying since the early 1900’s.

what remains of a brick building

All that remains are the trolly tracks

Here’s the explanation for the Technorati ranking change:

The change affects how Technorati ranks its over 18.5 million blogs. Our new link counts expose more active blogs and rising stars, allowing readers to discover blogs currently receiving the attention of the blogosphere.

Which I guess means, since Technorati is the authority on such things, my weblog is of much less interest, and would be considered a falling star. Throw in who knows how long I’ll be on Shelter Duty, and I’ll probably fall of the charts.

And that’s the real problem with ranking systems such as this: they imply a worth. And when you’re ‘rank’ falls, it’s the same as saying that you are worth less.

I wonder how many new voices this will enable; how equitable this will be. I don’t know. From a first glance at the top 100, I don’t see an increase in representation or diversity. Still see a lot of the same faces.