Category: Weblogging

Categories
RDF Social Media Technology Weblogging

Creating social networks few want

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

There has been considerable discussion this week on Techmeme about weblogging tool as social networking platform, based on Six Apart’s release of Movable Type Pro 4.2. The announcement was still wet from its birth when the WordPress folks started touting BuddyPress, a variation of social networking based on WordPress.

Among the social networking requirements for a weblogging tool are:

  • Support for FriendFeed and other feed aggregation
  • Support for Twitter
  • Forum support
  • Creating user accounts, with profiles and avatars
  • Enabling community-driven content
  • Content voting, ala Digg

I waited for the Drupal folks to tick off each of these, as this type of behavior is already built into Drupal, or provided via plug-in. For instance, support for the just given list can be met by Drupal via the following:

  • Aggregation support is a module included with the Drupal installation. In addition, the FriendFeed Drupal module provides two-way FriendFeed communication.
  • Ditto with the Twitter Drupal Module
  • Forum support is another module included with the Drupal installation, though it doesn’t have a traditional forum look and feel. The upcoming Advanced Forum module supposedly provides the missing pieces for a standalone forum.
  • All of the user functionality is also built-in, or provided as installation module, including adding users, profiles (with avatars), as well as being able to create user profiles with differing permissions. For instance, registered users to this site who I know are given a “Trusted user role” wherein they can post comments without the comment going into moderation. I could also allow users to post photos, in addition to posts of their own — it’s all role-based.
  • You can use the Voting API module with Drupal for content voting, and there have been other efforts to create a Digg-like functionality, though there just doesn’t seem to be much interest in this within the Drupal community.

In fact, Drupal began its life as a bulletin-board system, adding weblogging functionality at a latter time. It is “community-based” from the ground up. Knowing all of these, I watched Planet Drupal for someone to mention about all of this already existing capability in Drupal. And I watched. And I watched.

Nothing. Not a word. Oh, there may be those who are in the process of writing about Drupal’s capability, as compared with the new Movable Type/Wordpress initiatives, but the interest has been more about the upcoming DrupalCon, upgrading to the newest releases, and various other activities; providing yet another demonstration of the differences in communities surrounding Silicon Valley based applications, and an application with beginnings not only outside California, but also outside the United States. Differences that not only don’t include that sense of competition that seems to exist with both MT and WordPress, but that also represent a general lack of interest in becoming part of whatever new movement is currently deemed to be it. it for the moment, that is.

(A difference I’ve not, yet, come to absorb, being still imbued with the vestigial impulse to validate my choice of tools by pointing out We are first! We are better!, and hence, my earlier paragraphs. )

However, to be fair to the vast majority of MT and WP users, there isn’t that much communication in the general WordPress or MT communities, either, about the newest social networking “needs” that seem to be the driving force behind these new tool developments. Regardless of tools used, I find it unlikely that most people are interested in much of the social networking capability that is now being touted as “necessary”.

In her post at ReadWriteWeb related to the release of the new version of MT, Sarah Perez asks, Is this the future of blogging? Or is this the future of web publishing altogether? I think we’ll find, ultimately that the answer is no. The Silicon Valley mindset, for wont of a better term, wants social networks, and assumes the rest of must want the same thing. However, I think we’ll find that most of us just want a web that’s both open and accessible, and there is a vast difference between an open web and a social network.

In an open web, we may try to annotate our writings with metadata, so that the information described in this metadata could be merged by other applications. We work to ensure our work is easily accessible, and (though not always), try to engage our readers. We hope that the site is viewable by a variety of devices. To facilitate these interests, we’ve added syndication feeds and comments, some use of microformats, semantic markup, and even, on rare occasion, RDF, and perhaps a feed aggregator or photo feed in the sidebar. We try to create valid web pages, and use CSS to add a little of our own personality to the site’s look. At a stretch, we may include FriendFeed or Twitter postings, too, but I think interest in these is rarer than one would expect by the cacophony of noise that seems to accompany both services.

An open web, however, does not demand a web whereby the line of demarcation between the writer and the reader becomes blurred, and the reader is assumed to not only be reader, but writer, editor, and critic too— becoming one of many, which seemingly are then used to not only prove the popularity of the site, but also help monetize it.

Specifically, the success of our spaces is not a measure of noise but of satisfaction. What’s happened, though, is that to the Silicon Valley mindset, noise is a measure of satisfaction, so the more accouterments enabling noise, the better.

Posting writings and allowing comments are not enough: we must also give people profiles, with avatars and ranking systems, and the ability to vote comments up and down. By providing multiple levels at which our readers can engage, we create that noise that is seemingly so important in order to justify the worth of our spaces. What we’re finding, though, is that based on such activity, the noise level may increase, but it increases as noise, rather than the thoughtful comments that inspired our original interest, years ago.

As we invite the readers to become more involved, we probably will increase the popularity of our sites, but at what cost? We lose the ability to own our own spaces; to be able to suddenly switch one day from writing about HTML5 to writing about art. Even having comments means we give up some control over what we do in our spaces. All too often when I visit tech web sites and the author is writing on some other topic, I read in comments: “That’s not why I read your site, I don’t care about foo. I want to read about bar”? Or the newer complaint many of us have begun receiving since the advent of Twitter: “*This post is too long to read.”

Voting up and down may increase the number of visitors, and they may feel increasingly engaged, but look at what happens at sites like Digg. Though interesting stories may appear in the front page, such as the one about CAPTCHA technology being improved with the help of old manuscripts, many more are based on the amount of controversy associated with the topic, and not whether the topic is useful, or even relevant. More importantly, popular sites proliferate in popularity driven listings while less popular sites are pushed to the back, making it that much more difficult to find not only new and interesting information, but new and interesting sites. The reader becomes not only writer, editor, and critic, but also gatekeeper.

I’m not writing this to be critical of Six Apart’s new Movable Type social networking software, or the upcoming BuddyPress by WordPress—more power to **both groups in working to expand their offerings. To extrapolate, though, from these new offerings to a whole new web is typical of a mindset that is becoming increasingly isolated in how it views the web and how the web should be.

More importantly, to extrapolate one small group’s determination of what’s necessary in order to be “successful”, to the broader population can actively hurt rather than help the web. Do we really want a web without nooks and crannies, small voices, quiet places, and serendipitous finds? That’s not the web I want. To say that we’re all becoming increasingly narcissistic, is to say that one group’s self-obsession is shared by all, and I don’t think that’s true.

*And I include this post among those considered “too long to read”.

**But Drupal was first.

Categories
Weblogging

Watch the Birdie not the Hand: Scandal in Weblogging

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

There’s pile-ons, and then there’s pile-ons. Just when the people who owned Techmeme tried to generate a controlled burst of activity related to Loren Feldman, Shel Israel, and some stupid puppet (actually covered by the Guardian as news, to the ever lasting embarrassment of the British), the real story was going on elsewhere, and not a hint of it anywhere to be seen. It was only when both Rafe and Seth posted on the recent BoingBoing/Violet Blue thing that I became aware of the latest fooflah.

BoingBoing no longer loves Violet Blue and has unpublished several posts related to her. Considering that Violet Blue seems, at least to me, to be a “BoingBoing” kind of gal— equal parts sex and narcissism—I was rather surprised to see such behavior from a “freedom” loving rag mag like BoingBoing. Surprised, but not so much that I would do more than read the Boing Boing post and then move on.

What stopped me and caught me long enough to read more and even comment here was what Teresa Nielsen Hayden wrote in the post at Boing Boing:

Bottom line is that those posts (not “more than 100 posts,” as erroneously claimed elsewhere) were removed from public view a year ago. Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her. It’s our blog and so we made an editorial decision, like we do every single day. We didn’t attempt to silence Violet. We unpublished our own work. There’s a big difference between that and censorship.

(emph. mine)

I really dislike the all too frequence happenings of, “I know something awful about this person, but am above providing all the details”, sort of smug self-satisfied innuendo, which serves not only to generate attention, in a carefully controlled way, but also to leave it to the reader’s fevered imagination as to the heinous nature of the act committed to deserve such disapprobation. If you’re going to condemn publicly do so explicitly, cleanly, so that the other party at least has a fighting chance to defend themselves. Not this air-kiss-slap that passes too often as honorable behavior in Silicon Valley.

behaved in a way… What did Violet, that bad girl, do? Did she sleep with an entire Catholic School boy’s choir? Knowing BoingBoing, the crew would look on this with favor. Maybe she kicks kittens. She does wear spikey shoes…does she kick kittens?

Perhaps Violet Blue secretly voted for George Bush. That might be enough, but how would the BoingBoing crew find out, unless Violet Blue got drunk on lemon drops and spilled the beans.

However, I should have remembered who the parties involved are with this little contretemps. According to several comments, the issue could be related to the fact that Violet Blue had trademarked her name, and then sued a porn star for using it. Who Violet Blew, indeed.

Oh. My. God. The infamy of the act. If this is true, then of course what else could the Boing Boing crew do but wash the Blue dust from their hands and disavow all knowledge of Violet. After all, a person who sues to protect their name is only one step away from supporting the AP. Or worse…the RIAA.

Living in Missouri, where we don’t understand these things, I have to think there is more to this than Violet Blue suing to protect her name. However, all we’re left with is the words, hanging over all, the Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her. Petty words that demonstrate that perhaps being unpublished by an organization like Boing Boing is an actual testament for your character, rather than against.

Two grown men fighting over a puppet, unpublished posts, and the quarrels of the rich and famous…and all we had for entertainment in Missouri this last week was a flood.

update

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out one of the worthwhile comments made in the Israel/Feldman puppet fiasco. It was from a site called Hacking Cough, authored by Chris Edwards, who wrote:

Feldman called the puppet “more real”: a classic bit of legerdemain. Israel was very real during the whole spat. He was angry. He was upset. He wanted to get even. Faced with what Feldman was doing to him, what would you want to do? Social media’s advice: be real, be honest.

But nobody believed the advice. The sensible advice to Israel was to bottle it up, act nice. And that probably would have worked. Had Israel gritted his teeth and pretended that he really loved the puppet, he would probably have come out of the whole episode more famous and better off. In other words, ignore Naked Conversations: Be inauthentic. You can’t blog or tweet your way out of a crisis any more than you can knit your way out of a burning building.

In other words, ignore Naked Conversations: be inauthentic. Very astute observation.

Categories
Weather Weblogging

Storms

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Dug out from a storm this week and the winds are still blowing, and the lighting still lighting up the sky and none of this has anything to do with the weather. Well, there was a storm earlier, which blew down the tree across from us. Lots of trees down online, too.

I emerged from various uninteresting things and went online this morning and found all these moods today. For instance, there’s an anti-intellectual/postmodern thing going on, links pulled together by AKMA, who attaches his own take on discussion.

I don’t know enough about postmodernism to be hostile about it, one way or another. I used to be insecure about this – now I’m glad. Ignorance really is bliss.

Jeneane’s leading the charge against the Jupiter Biz Blog conference – too many people attending too many conferences, and all of them are blogging about them, but what’s worse is their blogging about each other blogging about each other and I’m getting dizzy.

One more person writes “What’s a weblog” and I’m going to loose my cookies.

I found out I can’t use Plesk to manage accounts on the new co-op server because it’s dependent on MySQL 3.23, and we’ll be using MySQL 4.x. That’s okay, though, because we should use open source solutions like Webmin instead. Speaking of open source, from Ken’s posting today, sounds like there’s been a few trees down out in the Apache world.

Tom Shugart doesn’t think much of the heartland, or people with weight problems:

Each time I find myself back in the heartland, it seems to get worse. The food seems to get more and more tasteless and toxic, and the inhabitants more and more rotund. How can the food be so bad—and so bad for you, I wonder, in the middle of one of the richest agricultural areas in the world?

True, the small towns don’t always have the fancy cuisine, though you look about a bit and you might be surprised; and the people are just plain folks – many of them making little money because of unemployment, so they fill their diet with potatoes and pasta and Big Macs – cheap food but starchy and fattening. As Tom noted.

But one thing I’ll say about the midwest, which also include my beautiful new home, Missouri: I’ve never noticed a lack of courtesy in the people – something I found in short supply in California. Generosity, too, as several of us prepare for this weekend’s Race for the Cure, thinking how best to waddle around the 5K course.

I just had an exchange of emails with News is Free about linking directly to my photographs – that whirring sound you hear is my bandwidth being sucked dry.

Me: Don’t scrape my pages.
Them: Your RSS feed is hard to find.
Me: Autodiscovery.
Them: Human beings and handy little orange XML button.
Me: Your personal requirement does not make my courtesy into an imperative. Don’t like little orange button.

So, who is not in a pissy mood? Speak up.

At least nature always comes through: the fireflies made their debut last night. No photos – they’re camera shy. I’d send you all a bouquet of fireflies to cheer you up, but they don’t like the tiny little leashes and keep tearing off the bows. And FedEx said no way.

weeds.jpg

Categories
Technology Web Weblogging

WordPress 2.5 releases

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

WordPress 2.5 has released, including the bad markup generated with the Gallery option. If you serve your pages up as XHTML, the gallery won’t work for you. You will get invalid markup errors, the page will fail to load. Whether this can be fixed with a plug-in or not, I don’t know.

I’ve been told that if I don’t like the code, shut up, and *fix it myself. Leaving aside the “shut up” part, the issue isn’t just one problem in one piece of code–it has to do with a mindset. Last time I looked, you can’t submit a bug patch to change a mindset.

I did turn in a bug about the Gallery markup, and really did expect it to be fixed. Two people involved in WordPress 2.5, Jeffrey Zeldman and Matt Mullenweg have professionally benefited by their association with WaSP and the standards movement. If I seemed harsh in my previous writing on this, it is because I really did expect better from both Jeffrey and Matt. I think, though, my expectations don’t match today’s reality. Today’s reality is XHTML is out, HTML5 is in. HTML5 is much more marketable. HTML5 is sexy, HTML5 is hot, HTML5 sells.

I know many of my readers are tired of me bringing up standards and XHTML. On and on–I have become dull with repetition. Heck, I’ve just become dull. Several people have pointed out the draconian error handling of XHTML, how HTML5 is friendlier, and will “make things better”. HTML5 will make the web more “semantic”. HTML5 is the way of the future.

How can the web be better, though, when people who do know how to create valid web pages, choose to not do so because frankly they just can’t be bothered? How can HTML5 make the web more meaningful, when it can’t even guarantee something as simple as accuracy of syntax? As the spec is now, HTML5 is also a closed box, with no way to add something new, something different. With XHTML, I can add SVG, or RDF, or NextBigVocabulary, or ShelleysSecretSauceVocab, and it works, out of the box. You can’t do that with HTML5. Is HTML5 really a way forward? Or just a way for application developers to continue dishing out crap–but gee wiz, look, you can store data on the client now. And if you make a mistake, you won’t kill kittens, because goodness knows, every time Firefox displays the Yellow Screen of Death, God kills a kitten.

Firefox's YSOD kills kittens

I once before referred to today’s attitude about standards as being a race to the bottom. I made this statement because standards support is seemingly a thing of the past, a quaint relic of a previous web generation. The new web, the 3.0 web, the semantic web can’t be bothered with the old, the measured, and the fusty, when now is a time of quick ideas and even quicker implementations. Open Social! Open Data! Microformats! All you need now, is an idea and an audience. It doesn’t have to be a good idea, either, but it does have to have a big audience.

It is what it is, and I don’t have enough audience to impact much beyond my immediate vicinity. Thankfully for the riders of tomorrow’s web, when they do reach the bottom, HTML5 will be there, waiting for them. And who knows, I could very well be all wrong about all of this. Rather than a race for the bottom, perhaps this is a race for a baseline, and I just perceive the baseline to be less than what I think it can be. Perhaps I do reflect an era that is dead and gone and either I should adapt to move with the tide, or get out of the boat.

Well, I’ve not been particularly good at floating with the current in the past, so the only option for me is get out of the boat–or at a minimum, go find my own boat to row. I am going to do the WordPress folks a huge favor: I won’t continue using WordPress, no matter how pretty the new look, or how cool the new features. The WordPress developers have made too many decisions about how I should run my site, including HTML5 over XHTML, microformats over RDF, the canvas element over SVG, and so on. I find I just don’t want to follow the course they’ve deemed appropriate for the future. Or, to continue my nautical metaphor, we’ve reached an equatorial point, and WordPress wants one horizon and I want another and now, regretfully, we must part.

I am not unmindful of how much I owe the WordPress team for an application I’ve benefited from for several years. To the WordPress team, my sincere thanks for the use of your application, and your hard work in the past. WordPress has been both fun, and useful. Good luck with your future voyages.

*If you want to use the Gallery yourself and you serve your pages up as XHTML, you can fix the gallery page so that it doesn’t break in the browser with this PHP file. Just rename it to media.php and overlay the one in wp-includes. You’ll also have to turn off automatic entry formatting, too, because WordPress will insert paragraph elements erroneously. The Text Control plug-in will help you with turning off auto formatting, and it works with WP 2.5. The generated layout also plays havoc with IE8, at least with my layout. Your mileage may vary.

The generated markup still isn’t valid because of adding a stylesheet into the gallery within the page body, but with the changes I just detailed, at least it doesn’t kill a kitten.

Categories
Burningbird Technology Weblogging

WordPress 2.5: Looks

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Though I will be using Drupal for portions of my site, I’m still debating whether to continue using WordPress for purely weblog activities, such as at RealTech. I decided to download the WordPress 2.5 release candidate 1, give it a run.

I’ve moved most of my XHTMLating work to plug-ins, so I didn’t have the problems with overwriting source code. The plug-ins I do use worked without a hitch, including the one that XHTMLates comments (though the commenter’s name field doesn’t support internationalization at this moment).

I like the new dashboard, which does a good job of putting important information at the top. I don’t like the fact that you still don’t have a lot of options–or at least I can’t see them–for eliminating all of the crud that gets pushed at you. I don’t care about top plug-ins. I don’t care about other WP weblogs of note.

As for the new site design, I like the coloring, but I do not like all of the design changes. Case in point is the Write Post page, with post in process.

Look at all that wasted space. There are four headers above the Write Post page, and in the Write Post page, we now have to scroll down to control comments, pick categories, add tags. Yet what takes up the valuable real estate to the right? Related items, ie how to manage comments, posts, etc. When you’re writing a post, what are the items you’re most likely to edit for that post on a regular basis? I would say tags and categories, as well as comment status. You’re not worried about managing categories or comments.

I do like that the Delete button is now more obvious, rather than buried at the bottom of the post. In addition, I was happy to see a link to draft entries rather than forcing us to filter on draft to find a post in process. There’s also only one Save button for a post now, equivalent to the older “Save and Continue editing” function.

I also like the fact that you can edit the permalink, though the creators didn’t go far enough–you should also be able to pick which category goes into the formal permalink. I had hoped that the developers would also list existing tags in the tag area, but you still have to guess what tags you have if you don’t want to add new ones.

On the other hand, I do think the media management capabilities are superior in this version. If you serve video, you can now more easily manage your video, as well as music and image files. For instance, you can click on more than one file to upload, rather than have to upload individually. The application will then upload all the files, and for photos, attempt to use the photo’s EXIF file to fill in the relevant information, though the application doesn’t seem to like my photos’ EXIF sections.

However, if you’re tempted to have WordPress 2.5 create an in-page gallery, think again if you’re serving your pages up as XHTML: the generated gallery HTML is not valid.

This is a trivial error to fix, and I’ve sent the error information into the special feedback email address. However, this does demonstrate something I find a little disquieting–the WordPress developers are not running their sites as XHTML, themselves, in order to ensure WordPress provides both valid HTML and XHTML. Nor are the developers validating what they generate. If they did, they would realize that their sites don’t validate.

Worse, the validation errors are such blatant errors that even relatively inexperienced web developers–and web designers–should have caught them early, and prevented their occurrence at this late stage of WordPress 2.5 development. The only assumption I can make is that form is taking precedence over function with this release. Definitely not an attitude I would have expected considering the involvement in the development of WordPress 2.5 by known standards luminaries.

The page containing the gallery does not open in Firefox, Safari, or Opera because these browsers read the page as XHTML, and the page has invalid markup. However, the page does open in IE8. Perhaps the underlying issue is that IE8 is the browser of choice for the WP development team.

In the other sections, if you make any updates in the user page you have to type in your password again, or it tells you that you only entered it once. That’s annoying. The rest of the pages seem the same, except for a new Media Library, which shows what images are used where. Handy if you want to track down in which posts a specific image has appeared.

Overall, the interface is cleaner and media file management has definitely improved, but the usability has, in my opinion, taken a couple of major hits. I include in this category the freedom to serve our pages up as valid XHTML without having to struggle with invalid generated page markup.

Now, I’ll publish and see what happens to the feeds.