Category: Weblogging

I was asked why Technorati shows me not having updated in 125 days. Since we all know that if I was that long between updates I’d be dead, I have to wonder: does Technorati think me dead?

Seriously, anyone know where this value comes from? I’ve noticed that my links to posts aren’t showing up, either, but assumed this was some cosmic hee hee — like being weblog two thousand and one on Jeneane Sessum’s Aggregator 2.0.

Here’s an interesting pattern, see if you can spot it:

As regards to the first Chris Lydon radio broadcast, Dave Rogers makes a comment that Mike Sanders really liked but which Doc Searls counters with more positive feedback. Dave then responded to Doc who responded back to Dave.

Dave writes more, and in the middle somewhere points to Jon Garfunkle’s *New GateKeepers –where Jon points to a lot of these same people (Doc, David, Dave, Jarvis, et al). Mike Sanders responds to Dave and Doc and Chris Lydon, and David Weinberger also responds to Dave (linking Doc and Mike) and Doc links everyone for good measure. So do I come to that, but that’s because I’m asking you all: do you see the pattern?

You might be tempted to say that it reminds you of a cat fight but that’s not it–terms like ‘cat fight’ are reserved for disagreements between women, as a way of poking gentle fun at the little ladies and our silly quarrels. It’s used so that people can then approach the discussion with the proper frame of mind.

No one would ever use ‘cat fight’ to describe a serious disagreement among serious participants.

No, the answer I’m looking for is an onion. This conversation reminds me of an onion, and each person contributing is one layer of that onion. Some of the layers are close to the core, others further out — but they’re all onion regardless of relative position, and just as pungent.

Poly saw the pattern. Perhaps we should use the term ‘bear fight’ from now on. A bull fight comes to mind, but that’s already been taken.

*Note that Jon did link to women in the article, and has always been scrupulous at pointing out inequities in the weblogging world. I pointed to his post primarily because it was referenced in this conversation, and I liked the ‘gatekeeper’ title–so he’s not an onion. He’s sort of a scallion.

If you cast your mind waaay back, you’ll remember the IT Kitchen group effort we had at the end of last year. It was an interesting experiment–open up a weblog and a wiki to edit access by any person who came in off the street, and see what happens.

Well, like all new things it had its up and downs, not the least of them was my own fussing and hovering. But the real killer came after the Kitchen had been quiet for some time.

The Wiki was hit — hard– to the point where I didn’t even know how to recover it. The weblog, which had been relatively untouched for the longest period of time was also hit badly: in comments, trackback, and people coming in through the open doorway I provided. It got to the point that the only access to IT Kitchen was from spammers.

I ended up making a backup of the database and then closing the account. I wasn’t sure about putting it back up again, but I figured I would after a couple of months passed and the spammers hopefully had lost the address. Not the wiki — I won’t do a public wiki ever again. But a closed version of the weblog, in Wordform, so people’s links wouldn’t break.

Unfortunately, the CD I had burned of the backup ended up corrupted, and I couldn’t restore the database. The hosting company is great about backups, but not to an account that’s closed. Even then, if I had checked with them a few weeks back, they probably would have still had the backup.

There’s not much I can do to restore the entries at Kitchen, but luckily, some are still accessible through The Wayback Machine. I had hoped I would be able to also recover from Bloglines, but it looks like this service only goes back to January (or most recent 100 entries, whichever comes first).

If you do have an entry at the site you want to recover, now is the time to do it. And if anyone happens to have an aggregation of all the original entries, I sure would love a copy because I could re-build the weblog from this.

Lesson Two learned: One backup is not enough.

Lesson One learned: wikis updated by the general public only work if there’s enough people interested in helping to maintain it to offset the spammers, trolls, and script kiddies. In other words, the only viable public wiki is Wikipedia.