Category: Weblogging

Categories
Weblogging

Links not wanted

Feedster released its own version of a link ranking system, Feedster 500. It matches previous lists, but also has a number of surprises.

Unlike other lists, or even link aggregators, Feedster has been very forthcoming about how it derives its list and, more importantly, how it finds the incoming links it uses as the key component of its list: it finds them in syndication feeds. This will explain why there are some unexpected results in this list. First, blogrolls are left out of the calculation, as they are not part of syndication feeds, or at least, not traditionally part of syndication feeds. Second, and this is the kicker, if you publish a syndication feed that doesn’t provide full content, then your links are not being picked up by the service and used in its calculations.

My links weren’t picked up. In fact, when working with my Linkers tool, and the more sophisticated Talkdigger, I have found that none of my links to other sites are being picked up by any of the services. And when I went looking for how the services work, none of the tools, other than Feedster, publishes its process to find links and/or other searchable material.

This is frustrating because if I don’t care about lists and ranks, I do care about letting people know that I’ve written something about their posts. Since I don’t support trackback anymore, the only way another weblogger will know I’ve made comments on their work is if they read my weblog regularly, someone else tells them about my post, I put a link into their comments, or they see my URL show up in their referrer logs. And with abuse of referrers, these are less than useful nowadays, or even unavailable for some webloggers.

Besides, I don’t want just the weblogger to know I’ve written about their posts–I want others to know, too.

Now I know how Feedster works and that if I want links to show up in that service I have to provide full content. I don’t want to do this, I’ve never wanted to do this but either I decide to blow off inter-weblog communication, or I provide full feeds. The question then becomes: what about the other services?

Supposedly Technorati uses the syndication feed if this provides full content; otherwise it grabs the the main page and scrapes the data. By accessing only the front page, if I use the -more- link to split a larger post into a beginning excerpt with a link to the individual page, the links in this split apart page are then not included. If I then want to have my links picked up from a post, I either have to make sure they show in the very first part of the post, or not use the -more- capability.

Even when I don’t use -more- capability, my links are not showing up in Technorati. Nor in IceRocket, nor in Bloglines, nor in any of the other services as far as I can see. Now, I’m beginning to suspect that most services now use only the syndication feeds, which means I’ll have to use full content for them, also. As a test, I’ve set my site to provide full feed for now, and I’m linking to several sites in and at the end of this post to see which service, if any, picks up the links.

Other factors that could influence the feed being picked up include me repeating my permanent link to a post in the title and at the bottom of a post; publishing links to weblogger’s URLs in my comments (which could trigger spam filters); not pinging weblogs.com or blo.gs; perhaps even the fact that I only support one feed type (RDF/RSS). Without knowing how each of the services process links, your guess is as good as mine.

If I’m frustrated with the services, I also know how difficult it is to collect ‘good’ data from a site, as separated from ‘bad’; how to determine which links are coming from the outside (a commenter’s URL) versus ones from the site author; and a static link (blogroll) from a dynamic one (one included in a page). I can respect the challenge involved even as I am critical of the results.

What would I do if I were creating a service like this?

First, I wouldn’t scrape weblogs off of the global services, such as weblogs.com. These are mined by spammers so badly now as to make them useless. What I would do is provide a ping service that a person could trigger manually, or through their tool if it provides this facility.

I would access the syndication feed, and if full content is provided, I would process this for data and URLS. Otherwise, I would access these URLs directly to pick up links. By doing this, I’ll also be accessing URLs in comments and anything in the sidebars, which is why most services don’t want to access the individual entries — but I’d rather be more liberal than not when it comes to gathering data.

I would also like to send a bot once a day to access the main page, just to make sure updates haven’t happened that haven’t been reflected in the feed, and to access the blogroll and other more static data.

At this point in time, we have a lot of data. Pulling blogrolls and other static links out of content isn’t that hard if you have the storage to maintain history and can compare if a link provided today was also provided yesterday. About the only time I would refresh this in the database is if the link changed in some way– it was there one day, not the next. Or the content in which it occurred changed (and this could require a way of annotating context of a link, which could be pricey in storage and computation).

One interesting way of looking at this is to remove duplicate links when it comes to aggregation for lists, but to refresh the item in the most recently updated queue if it shows in fresh content at the site being scanned. With this you don’t need to have much context, and if a person is interested in finding out who is talking about a specific post, these top-level links won’t show.

As for links for comments — here is where the vulnerability to spam enters, but using an algorithm to find and discard multiple repeated URLs could help to eliminate these. Looking for domains that have been determined to be spamming is also another approach. Sometimes, though, we have to accept that some crap gets through. I’d rather let a little crap through than to discard ‘good’ stuff–just because I feel I’m in some kind of war with the spammers.

It could help to annotate links for blogrolls and links for comment URLs and so on. Not that abysmal ‘nofollow’, but with something meaningful, like ‘commenter URL’ or ‘blogroll link’ or something of that nature. We do something like this with tags, and though I don’t care much for tags in weblog post, I don’t agree with Bloglines’ Mark Fletcher that tags generally suck–especially when it comes to effective uses of microformatting to annotate links.

(Speaking of which, what kind of a post is: I was going to blog something about how tags are bad, evil horrible bad, and highlight the failure of existing search technology, but I couldn’t muster the energy. High level message: tags suck and are unnecessary except in cases where no other textual data exists (like photos, audio or video). Discuss amongst yourselves.. How’s this: Bloglines is indulging in evil censorship of my communication because it doesn’t pick up the links from my posts. Discuss among yourselves.)

Unfortunately, microformats generally require some technical expertise on the part of the person using them, and to base any kind of measurement on this is irresponsible.

Once I have data that is reasonably clean and fresh, if I were to create a list, I would do one based on popularity versus influence, and I would differentiate these by the number of blogroll links for a site, as compared to the number of dynamic links. A person that has a large number of dynamic links compared to static blogroll-like links to me would be a more influential person (hi Karl) than one who has a fairly even ratio between the two. I wouldn’t mind seeing this ratio in a list rather than the counts — we could then find who is influential within groups, even if the groups are smaller. Regardless, I would also provide the raw data to others, and let them derive their own lists if they want.

Why give away precious data? Because by keeping the source of the data and algorithms open, I establish credibility. In addition, flaws will be found and smart people will provide suggestions for improvement. Most importantly, I give those who would be critical of any of my processes nothing to hook on to — the algorithms are public, and mutable; the data is available to all. I have, in effect, teflon coated myself with Open Source. I agree with Mary Hodder a hundred percent on the advantages of openness when it comes to data gathering techniques and processing, and providing access to raw data–but not just for ranking.

As for business model, well knowing the algorithms and having access to the data is one thing; being able to use these effectively, consistently, and in a manner that scales is the bread and butter of this type of technology. Google never would have been Google if it was slow.

Additional links:

Joseph Duemer is teaching a class in weblogging today. Welcome to weblogging, Joe’s colleagues. Just as an FYI, I’m on the Feedster 500 list, which makes me a weblogging princess. If I were in the top 100, I would be queen. If I were in the top 10, well, I would be a lot wealthier than I am now.

Someone who is in the top 100 is the Knitty Blog. Now, this site ably demonstrates the nature of influence over popularity — it’s not that it’s linked statically by a lot of sites; but it is referenced in a large number of posts. That, to me, is influence.

Dare Obasanjo just uploaded 50 photos from his recent trip home to Nigeria. What I want to know, Dare, is why you took so many photos of billboards?

Fulton Chain carries the best b-link bar there is: with links to stories that cover a range of topics, such as a praying mantis eating a hummingbird, and how to build your own homemade flamethrower. Then there’s the Ode to Rednecks. Come on down and visit me in the Ozarks. Hear?

And that’s about enough about linking.

Categories
Diversity Technology Weblogging

Technology is neither good nor evil

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Technorati has been coming under fire a great deal lately, including this latest by Om Malik, who writes:

So this is where I lose the plot – I tag my post, Technorati benefits, and despite all that, my tags help spammers who clog my RSS readers gain more readers. That’s absolutely rotten! So essentially the spammers can write a script, generate tags, stay high on the Technorati listings and fool people into visiting their sites. By tagging I am helping this scumbags, the RSS-link blog spammers. This is clearly not going to help Technorati (or infact anyone’s reputation) as a good search tool.

This is a conversation we’ve been having for months, as I noted in Malik’s comments. He wrote an email asking for references, saying he’d searched on Google for the terms and I responded back with several links to several posts, including some of my own — most found by going to Technorati rather than Google. And therein lies the rub: a year ago, Technorati could do no evil. Now, Technorati can do no good. Neither is the absolute truth, because we’re applying terms such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to what is nothing more than technology, and technology just is. I don’t care for Technorati’s Top 100, because I see absolutely no value in it from a technological perspective, but much harm based on how the list is used to attach ‘authority’ to certain webloggers. However, I do like the ability to look at one of my posts in Technorati and see who has linked to it and, more importantly, what they’ve said. There is no inherent implication of authority in this, nor any indication of moral righteousness: it is just a reading of what is, and can’t be, shouldn’t be misused in implying value in the post. Now that many of the scaling and implementation issues are being taken care of, this service is very helpful. As for tags, I disagree with Technorati automatically converting categories into tags, as there is no overall value in this. I have categories that make no sense outside of the context of the weblog, and all they’re doing is polluting the environment. However, I found explicit tags to be helpful when I was trying to keep up with all of the recent BlogHer writings; not to mention those on Hiroshima. As for spamming, I’ve noticed that tags that are both very active and very time specific overwhelm the spam. BlogHer in a month may be filled with spam, but right after the conference, the links were relevant. Again, challenges in implementation aside, there is no implication of good and evil in tags; they are a service, nothing more. Not, I hasten to add, a way of ‘defining’ social groupings or any of the other glorious sounding purpose associated all too often with ‘authority’ (read that link) based technologies. Speaking of BlogHer, among those posts found in Technology, I was happy to read about the pushback against lists such as Technorati 100 that happened at BlogHer, but less than thrilled when this was, in my opinion, misconstrued as an ‘opportunity’ to replace ranking indexes such as Technorati 100 with something better. In particular Mary Hodder suggested …a community based algorithm, based on more complex social relationships than links. She had this idea going into the BlogHer conference, based on a dinner she attended one night with several people, including Ross Mayfield, who wrote at Many to Many:

Following Liz’s read of BlogHer, one of the more interesting points to come out of the conference is the need for constituent algorithms — ways of revealing hidden groups. For the BlogHer community, the Technorati 100 was more than a whipping boy, but an index where a group was under-represented. Mary Hodder’s approach, spot on, is to develop alternative indexes.

Ross then goes on to discuss the limitations on indexes, such as the authority implicit with each, which left me puzzled as to why he would approve of the development of alternative indexes. Yesterday, Mary released her new effort to identity alternate algorithms based on a dinner she had with Ross, Doc Searls, Halley Suitt, and others in Paris a couple of months ago. It’s a very detailed and thoughtful post, and I respect the amount of work she put in it, but it seems to me that no matter how much the community is involved in this effort, it’s just propagating the same problems, because the issue isn’t about technology, it’s about people and how we behave. If women are not as visible in weblogging (or technology or politics and so on) because of some esoteric to do with technology, then our problems could be easily solved. I would personally devote my life to finding the Woman Algorithm — the algorithm to give equality to women. But, as we’ve seen with the recent linking to BlogHer reports, the issue isn’t that simple. Even considering the fact that BlogHer was about women in weblogging, the single most linked individual post on the conference, was Jay Rosen’s–one of the few men to attend the conference. Why was Jay’s the most linked? Well, some of it was because he provided a viewpoint that led to debate. He used a ‘confrontational’ term that was guaranteed to trigger furious discussion. I linked to him for that specific reason, as did other people. However, Halley Suitt also wrote a post that generated much debate, and though it was also well linked, not as much as Jay’s. Does this, then, mean that Jay’s was a better post? No, not necessarily. If you look at those who linked to Jay, you’ll see two patterns: people who linked to Jay because of what he said, and others who linked to Jay because of who he is. What is the common characteristic of those who linked to Jay without specifically referencing the ongoing discussion? They were all men. Is this relevant? Well, considering the purpose behind Blogher, I would say the results aren’t irrelevant. I suppose we could compensate by having all the women at BlogHer link to Halley just because–but that doesn’t solve the problem, it just ‘hides’ it in this particular instance. Links based on the work are something that can be measured accurately with technology, and used to derive some overall value–interest if nothing else. But the latter, this linking because of who a person is, can’t be normalized with technology; no matter how clever the algorithms or how open the process. Not unless we start adding demographic metadata to our weblogs such as sex, age, economic classification, race, married status, political party, and so on. Though there are those who wouldn’t hesitate to put this information online, most would, rightfully, look askance at the process. Even if we tried to analyze a person’s links to another, we can’t derive from this anything other than person A has linked to person B several times. If we use these to ‘define’ a community to which we belong, and then seek to rank ourselves within these communities, all we’ve done is create a bunch of little Technorati 100’s — and communities that are going to form barriers to entry. We see this ‘communal’ behavior all too often: a small group of people who know each other link to each other frequently and to outsiders infrequently; basically shutting down the discussion outside of the community. Continuing, Mary writes:

So the tension is, do we in the blogosphere figure out a more sophisticated, open standard based metric that reflects the way we see blogs, within and across communities, in order to score blogs? And do we do this within topic areas? Or does using a more sophisticated algorithm across all blogs make more sense? Or do we allow this all to be done for us, possibly in an opaque way by some of the blog search engines or by people who are trying to figure out blogger influence and communities for their clients, or do we write off those efforts because we know they cannot possibly understand us anyway? I have to say, I’ve resisted this for the past year, even though many people have asked me to work on something like this, because I hate rankism. I think scoring, even a more sophisticated version of it, akin to page-rank, is problematic and takes what is delightful about the blogosphere away, namely the fun of discovering a new writer or media creator on their terms, not others. What I love is that people who read blogs are assessing them over time to see how to take a blogger and their work. But more recently, as I said, I’m seeing these poorly done reports floating around by PR people, communications companies, journalists, advertising entities and others trying to score or weight blogs. And after hearing the degree to which people are upset by the obtuseness of the top counts, and because they do want to monetize their blogs or be included into influencer ranks, I’m at the point where I’d like to consider making something that we agree to, not some secretly held metric that is foisted upon us.

I think Mary should stop with …I hate rankism. I understand the motivations behind this work, but ultimately, whatever algorithm is derived will eventually end up replicating the existing patterns of ‘authority’ rather than replacing them. This pattern repeated itself within the links to Jay Rosen’s post; it repeated itself within the speaker list that Mary started for women (“where are the women speakers”), but had its first man within a few hours, and whose purpose was redefined within a day to include both men and women. Rankings are based on competition. Those who seek to compete will always dominate within a ranking, no matter how carefully we try to ‘route’ around their own particular form of ‘damage’. What we need to challenge is the pattern, not the tools, or the tool results. Of course, I realize that mine is just one opinion among many and this work will continue regardless of what I write. As a tech, I’ll be interested to see the algorithm develop and even provide whatever insight I can. That is, if my rank gives me the necessary authority.

Categories
Diversity Weblogging

Life isn’t an oven, you can’t control the temperature

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

It would be the ultimate irony if of the individual posts related to BlogHer, the one or ones linked the most were either by guys who attended the conference, or those who didn’t. Having said that, I am linking to one, Jay Rosen’s.

Of his overall impression of the conference, Rosen wrote:

It seemed to me (and I told the conference this part) that these were reflections on a kind of terror that is by now deeply associated with the Internet, especially the strangers who are on it. At a conference of bloggers that was 80 percent men and 20 percent women (the usual ratio) this would barely be heard. I don’t recall many expressions of dread from bloggers at the three BloggersCons I attended.

Here it was routine, which is not to say bloghercon was dominated by expressions of terror (because it wasn’t, at all…) but rather in a conference that is 80 percent women—and where 100 percent of the tone was set by women—there were no disincentives to speaking about raw fears connected intimately to the act of blogging.

From what I’ve read in other posts and heard in the chat room, I agree with Elisa in that I don’t think the conference focused unduly on ‘terror’ or fears of this or that exposure. There was the one session on Naked Blogging, but that discussed the ramifications of being too personal in one’s blogging and having to be careful. I don’t necessarily equate this with terror. Same as I don’t equate flaming or criticism with terror.

How to explain the differing interpretations? I think that Jay’s journalism background played a major part in how he framed the discussion and he naturally did as a journalist would: he opted for the catchy phrase. Let’s face it, “terror” is a grabber. This isn’t, necessarily, to imply a criticism of what Jay wrote, or the terminology he used. In fact, there is something to be learned from Jay’s post-BlogHer wrapup, as his writing has generated discussion in other weblogs, as well as references ( i.e. links) back to his post. This writing is, in a way, a ‘take away’ for the participants, as much or more than the cool Google bag.

(Speaking of which: can I have one of those?)

Does this mean, then, that you have to use catchy phrases or other journalistic mechanisms when you write in your weblog? Of course not! But if you want the flash and sizzle, you got to be able to start the fire, and the terminology you use is part of the stick (ahem) rubbing process.

But I don’t want to just write about Jay — even if I do adore irony. So on to the ladies, and something else that caught my eye.

There were two global sessions at BlogHer in addition to the start up and wrap up: the A-listing and links session (led by Halley Suitt, Lisa Stone, and Charlene Li); and, during lunch, a discussion on Flame, Shame, and Blame (Ellen Spertus, Liza Sabatar, Alisa Valdes (who responded to the conference by quitting her weblog and telling other webloggers “To get a life. I am”), and Mobile Jones) .

Reading the liveblogging and other notes from the sessions, supposedly, one gathers, some want more of the one–more visibility, more links– without the other–shaming, blaming, and flaming. This seemed to me to be both confusing and a contradiction; it’s the same as saying you want to take a strong stand on an issue, but you don’t want to defend it.

Halley wrote an interesting note today on the conference, addressed, I assume, to some of those who have been critical of the conference and the sessions:

Feel free to disagree, as long as you attended BlogHer and can attest to the facts I state. If you haven’t attended a conference recently with an 80% female audience and 100% female speaker roster, save your comments until you attend one — like the next BlogHer, okay? Seems only fair. It’s like writing a movie review of a movie you haven’t seen — go see the movie first.

(Oddly enough, of those who have been particularly critical of BlogHer, most are men, and most have only linked to other men, even as they reference what other women wrote or said–a refreshingly honest and direct and rather fascinating attempt to reassert the dominate paradigm of male centered communication. Social scientists take note. Please feel free to use my Linkers tool to investigate this yourself.)

Halley writes that we should withold our (seemingly ‘critical’) opinions, but then also focuses on asking for links, and herein lies the confusion. By all means eschew popularity and the attendant difficulties, but note that the two–popularity and hassles–go hand in hand, as any of the popular sites demonstrate: most highly linked webloggers write controversial text, and take strong stands, or have strong opinions; as a consequence, they get their share of strong, and even vitriolic debate. Even those who write primarily on their personal lives can attest that their writing does not float along on a stream of kind good will.

Life doesn’t assess that you are a gentle being and then respond accordingly. Weblogging doesn’t see that you shrink from confrontation, and route damaging opinions around you. With the links you ask for, you will receive the following:

People will react. Sometimes people will react personally. Sometimes people will be mean. Sometimes they will seek to hurt.

The anonymous troller. The anonymous troller is a fact of life. Ignore them, delete their comments, laugh at them, whatever. Feed them if it’s fun, or don’t if it isn’t. But you control how much energy you give them by your actions. If you take what anonymous trollers say to heart, you are giving them power. Ultimately if you can’t handle this environment because they have too much power, then consider changing the environment: eliminate comments and password protect your space. Or as Alisa did: quit.

The passive-aggressives. I don’t know about anyone else, but I dislike passive-aggressive behavior with a passion. Either say what you mean, directly, honestly, and without games and take the lumps; or shut the fuck up and sulk. One or the other. Still, the passive-aggressive live and breath and exist in our society. And the P-As suck onto links, like a slug to flesh. All we can do is watch out for their sincere insincerity and keep our backs to the wall.

Anger. But anger can be useful.

Disagreement.

Feel free to disagree, as long as you attended BlogHer…. The weblogger’s motto is Feel free to disagree and that’s followed by a period. We don’t take kindly to caveats; we eat provisos for breakfast.

If you ask for links, you will most likely get contention. Even if you don’t go specifically for links, if you make a strong or controversial statement in your weblog, you are going to get a response and it isn’t always going to be pleasant. There will be those who make take what you write personally and respond in kind. There will be those who disagree strongly, and respond in kind. You have to take responsibility for your actions, and that includes writing. If you make a strong statement and people respond, you can’t suddenly change the protocol in mid-debate and demand people play ‘nice’.

A long time ago, I was feeling hurt about the comments I was receiving in a post and went to a friend, a good friend, for commiseration. Rather than commiserate with me, he basically said I was responsible for how the people were reacting to me. I would make strong statements and then when people responded in kind, I would act all hurt, which was frustrating to the other people, leading them to become even more personal in their responses.

His words were like a cold splash of water in the face. They hurt, made me cringe, really pissed me off, and then hurt, cringe, and piss off all over again. It’s only been over time that I’ve come to realize that he was right. Oh, not completely–there were other factors involved, not the least of which is the tendency of men to add an emotional context to women’s writing, which can be equally frustrating. But for the most part, he was right.

I was not accepting the responsibility for my actions and responding in kind. I would be critical of others and then get all hurt when they were critical in kind. I was, literally, setting the other participants up, and pulling a “po’me” on them just when they started to build up steam. Ouch! Bam! Right in the bullseye, too. Suddenly I’m ten again, riding in the back seat of the family car with my brother and yelling out, “Mo-o-o-m! He’s picking on me!”

Since then, I’ve tried to be aware of this in myself and curb the tendency, though not always successfully. It’s natural to want to point out the errors of others, and to deny others the same courtesy in regards ourselves. However, it’s also natural for us to just squat anywhere when we need to pee. Sometimes for the good of the society in which we inhabit we have to rise about what’s natural.

But what if isn’t ourselves that are responding to the negative commentary. What if our friends do so , to protect us? Well, your friends are not helping you.

In my post To Google, Pregnancy is Evil a couple of people disagreed with some of my statements. John thought one of my statements was over the top, and that Google shouldn’t necessarily be held responsible for this one person’s actions; another, Quantum Jim from Slashdot wrote that some of my posts seemed to have a bitter tone in them, lately.

Dave Rogers and Yule Heibel responded to both John and Jim, passionately and eloquently and in disagreement, but they didn’t do so to ‘protect me’. If their only interest in responding is to protect me, Yule and Dave would be responding in all of my threads where I’ve made strong statements and had disagreement. My sidebar would be litered with “Yule” and “Dave”. People would be saying to themselves: geez, don’t piss on Shelley or that Yule or Dave will whack you but good.

Now, Jim may be feeling that way a bit right now, but that’s just because he walked into it. Uhm, repeatedly. And here’s a smiley to go with that 😉

(Speaking of this discussion, and this is a digression from the main topic: do guys apologize to other guys for ‘hurting’ them in these debates? Just curious.)

Now if I said something either Dave or Yule disagreed with, and if it triggered the same interest to respond, they would write as eloquently in disagreement as in agreement. That’s the way this all works. Or, that’s the way this all should work.

Yet how many threads have we been in where disagreement with the writing is equated with disagreement with the person, and have had people respond accordingly? More, how many times has a weblogger’s friend gone into the comments of a post where another weblogger has been critical and again, moved to ‘protect and defend’?

If you as a weblogger encourage this, after a while no one is going to want to link to you, debate you, or even acknowledge you because they don’t want to have to deal with your friends. Can you see, then, how this can adversely impact on your being linked? Or even treated with respect?

For those of you who discuss ‘safe’ places, is this, then, what you want? That we don’t even talk about you? That we don’t link to you? That we don’t make comments in your posts? You can’t pick and choose — only the ‘positive’ or ‘constructive’ criticism is welcome; only ‘helpful’ comments are welcome. Or in Halley’s case, only those who attended the conference can speak on it.

As for those unkind, the world is an unkind place at times. People cut in front of you in traffic, your kids get in fights at school, you work with someone you can’t stand — it is life. If you want your weblog to be ‘safe’ from this, then you have to make it safe from life. Is that what you want?

If you don’t want the links, and you don’t want the world to know about you, then by all means, build a safe place. Make sure that people understand that only friends are welcome, and that any form of criticism is not. Don’t read the posts of those who link to you. Stop Google and other webbots from indexing your page, to keep Others out. And don’t leave your weblog URL when you leave a comment elsewhere. Better yet: don’t comment elsewhere. Well, unless it’s in a friend’s weblog, where nary a harsh word is exchanged.

Over time, you will have a safe place. It will be a very quiet place, but a safe one.

Asking for links without the possibility of heat. Might as well try to roast marshmallows over your computer.

Categories
Diversity Technology Weblogging

Lurking tool hit one

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I was asked in the BlogHer chat if my ears were burning and I can see why — I was mentioned in the opening session debate of the conference.

Here is a liveblogging account where Mena Trott says that I dismiss her, and criticize the company because there are no women in it. I don’t think I’ve mentioned Mena Trott for the longest period of time, but I have been critical of Six Apart as the company has not hired women to do back end development. In fact, I don’t think any women are involved with the development of the tool at all now, but could be wrong.

As for Meg Hourihan, I’ve never dismissed her contribution as a Blogger developer, and Catarina Fake knows I hold her in high esteem. Interesting.

What followed is a note about Marc Canter and if we don’t like how the tools work, create our own and tell the guys to fuck off.

A great idea Marc. I’ll start something and then see if Joi will fund me. Then the blogging guys could do what they want, undistrubed by us pesky women asking embarrassing questions.

Most definitely looking forward to hearing the transcript now.

Categories
Weblogging

Chocolate. I use chocolate.

You, too, could be suffering Severe Blog Depression or SBD.

Left untreated, SBD can lead to some seriously twisted mental behavior, as demonstrated in this comment found at the Blog Depression site:

Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but

I’m on a mission from God.

Must post! Must post!

If you’re suffering from SBD, get help now…before it’s too late.

(Special thanks to Pascale.)