Category: Weblogging

Categories
Technology Weblogging

NoFollow

Six Apart has announced what Dave Winer only hinted about and we’ve been expecting — Google and the other search companies have partnered with the weblogging companies to come out with the use of rel=”nofollow”, as a way of dealing with comment spam.

When added to the weblog template for links, this instructs the search bots not to include the links within page ranking. The point being that once the spammers realize that their effort is futile, they’ll go away, like the professional business people we all know they are.

This might have worked…three years ago when we the webloggers called out for Google to help. At the time that comment spam started to become a problem, one of the suggestions was for Google to get involved and come up with a way to mark links so that they have no value for the Google webbot.

Now, all these years later, we read the following at Six Apart:

Recently, we’ve reached out to other blog tool vendors to try to coordinate information about comment spam techniques and behaviors. As part of these efforts, we’ve also begun to talk to search companies about enriching linking semantics to better indicate visitor-submitted content (like comments or TrackBacks).

Others are jumping up and down about this now, such as Scoble. I’m not quite jumping up and down. But I’ll add it to my template, and hope for the best.

If you do implement this, you need to implement it not only in your comment listing but also in the sidebar ‘recent comments’ plugin or code that you’re using. Your legitimate commenters or trackbacks won’t get any link rank for their entries, but I imagine people are so desperate they don’t care anymore.

Remembered another

WordPress is going to have to change its comment policy to automatically create hypertext links for internal links. Otherwise spammers will just include links within the comment itself.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Take your hands off the tech and back away slowly

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Several people have linked to Martin Schwimmer and his indignation about the fact that Bloglines re-prints the content of his post, without attribution and with the possibility of future advertisements (…or guilty until proven innocent). This violates the cc license, he says, because he can only be republished if proper attribution is given, and in a non-commercial setting.

This sounded familiar, and sure enough, digging around in my archives finds this. where another person reacted in outrage when they found out their feed was being re-published:

What was a surprise is that Mitch reversed himself and now offers a Creative Commons license on his material, though the license information isn’t duplicated in Mitch’s RSS feed directly. Mitch also brings up the ‘commercial’ aspect of re-publishing the material at LiveJournal, and what’s to stop someone from grabbing the content and putting it behind password protected sites that charge money for access.

Easy – don’t publish all your entire post in your RSS feed; keep the RSS feeds to excerpts only. Remove the content-encoded field and just leave the description. And adjust your blogging tool to publish excerpts, only. If your weblogging tool doesn’t allow this adjustment, ask the tool builder to provide this capability. The RSS feeds are there to help promote your ideas, not promote their theft. But you have to control the technology, not let the technology control you.

Wait until he discovers the other online sites, such as 2rss.com, that do add ads into the feed if you use it to subscribe within any aggregator, Bloglines or not.

update

Also, see this about creative commons licenses and RSS feeds back in 2002.

Question to Mr. Schwimmer — is your cc license attached to your feed?

Categories
Weblogging

So

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

When my roommate came home tonight, I asked him if he’d heard that Six Apart might buy LiveJournal.

“Six who, buy live what?”, he asked.

“Six Apart and LiveJournal.”

“Who or what are Six Apart and LiveJournal.”

“They’re weblogging companies. Well, to be more precise, Six Apart is a weblog company, and LiveJournal is a community that happens to use weblogging technology.”

“Okay.”

“Well Six Apart, one of the larger weblog tool makers is rumored to be buying LiveJournal, one of the larger weblogging communities.”

He looked at me a moment, still wearing his rain gear from the trip home from the office.

“So?”

So.

Update

The news has been confirmed. Of course it was–did anyone expect differently after the ‘leak’?

There is an ironic twist to this, as the LiveJournalers have just been promised trackback on the very day when most sites with trackback have suffered serious spam attacks. Welcome to the big outside world, our new brothers and sisters in weblogging arms.

For all of you Movable Type users, you may want to check out the FAQ on this new merger carefully, specifically the point about MT:

Q. What does this mean for Six Apart and our existing products?

A. It means that Six Apart now offers top quality blogging software for every type of blogger on the planet. With LiveJournal, we now have a blogging service intended for individuals to interact with family and friends, bringing us a new audience that is distinct from the one for our current product line. TypePad is a hosted service used by avid webloggers who want a more flexible tool. And Movable Type, our server based solution for web professionals gives corporations and institutions an effective way to communicate both within their company and to their customers.

(emph. mine)

The questions today has been about LiveJournal. What will happen to LiveJournal? The questions really should have been about Movable Type. What will happen to MT?

PS Baby sharks comes to mind, right about now. Oopsie, where did that come from.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Close your trackbacks

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

After a couple of test trackbacks yesterday, I knew that today most likely we would start seeing trackback spam, and so it has proved.

I would suggest that people turn off trackback capability if they’re concerned about receiving spam, until safeguards are put on this other rather huge, gaping hole into our sites.

Update

Matt also noted the trackback problems today, and mentioned about the only viable approach to the problem being a content-specific solution. Which means blacklists based on words.

We’ve already seen that these aren’t particularly effective. They’ve blocked legitimate comments based on fractions of words triggering the filter; they don’t stop crapflooding; they add processing burden on to already over burdened systems; and they’re too easily manipulated to filter on legitimate domains.

Now, we’re looking at doing the same with trackback.

What’s the best approach? Well, with trackbacks, you have a lot more ability to add intelligent safeguards because no one trackbacks anonymously. One can check back at the site to make sure the trackbacked URL is legitimate, or send an email to the track backer confirming the trackback. If this doesn’t defeat the trackback spammer who actually build sites with the permalinks included, then just plain moderate trackbacks.

Unlike comments, trackbacks are removed from the flow of conversation, so if one doesn’t show up immediately, no harm.

In addition, even the most popular post doesn’t receive more than 20-30 trackbacks, at most. It’s no burden to manage the posting of trackback manually. And of course, trackbacks, as with comments, should have throttles in place to prevent being crapflooded.

Why do we have to make things more complicated then they have to be? The more moving parts, the more we’re at the mercy of the spammers.

Trackback moderation — simple, easy, works.

Categories
Weblogging

Good to see

Ed Cone shined his journalistic light on Karl Martino and Philly Future in a nice question and answer interview. Philly Future is the Philadelphia equivalent of The St. Louis Bloggers, and then some–that aggregator is a nice option. Perhaps we need a Planet St. Lous.

I liked Karl’s advice for integration between alternative media, such as local weekly newspapers, and webloggers:

—What would your advice be for us in Greensboro — both at the N&R as
it tries to set up a community web presence involving bloggers, and for
bloggers who want an independent online alt-media?

I notice you already have some great advice shared to you by folks who
know far more than me. But I’ll try my best. Take it with a grain of
salt. It appears you have two camps: those that think N&R should host
blogs, and those who think it should aggregate the independent
community. There are some that say do both and I’m with them.

* Aggregate your existing and growing local blogger community.
Encourage folks to join it. Provide them with pointers and advice on
how to do so. Get them to publicize their feeds. Greensboro101 us a
great start.

* Host blogs for those that are not comfortable to go elsewhere. Your
paper is a brand that inspires trust and some folks will be far more
comfortable using tools you host. Empower these folks and watch what
happens.

* And here is the most important point, right from Dave Winer’s “How to
make money on the internet”: use editorial staff and the community
itself to find the very best writers and posts within your hosting
solution and within the larger community. Highlight what they do and
stories they have posted. Put these posts of yours in a place where the
community will see them. In the paper. In the sidebars of your
newspaper’s online edition. Right on it’s front page. All over the
place! It will encourage participation.

Considering the recent problems with the local weekly, Riverfront Times and the former weblogger that I wrote about last week, seems to me that RFT might take some of this to heart.

Karl also had some very nice things to say about me that I’ve been thinking about since he let me know this interview was online. He wrote:

You need to really put yourself out there to do a good job of it. You need to be personal. Philly Future didn’t have enough personality (a problem it still has I think) and I didn’t put my heart on my sleeve the way I do off the web. Look at http://weblog.burningbird.net/. She has a community because her online voice is so authentic. I’m still too reserved.

I think there is personal and then there’s personal. In the last post I wrote about the famous strip tease artist, Lili St. Cyr, who created art out of the erotica, while only exposing brief and tantalizing glimpses of herself; as compared to the bump ‘n grind girls who just dropped trou and swung their boobies.

I know some great writers that can weave a truly intimate story around a simple act like buying a computer, designing a web site, attending martial arts classes, carving a Santa out of wood, or sitting outside a library getting busted by the cops; while other writers will provide every detail of the sex they had the night before, and not tell you a word about themselves.

When I write, I strive to be the former, but sometimes stray to the latter. Well, except for the sex, thing.