Category: Weblogging

Categories
Weblogging

Feminism, Sexism, and Powderpuff Blogging

I once wrote about being a ‘powderpuff’ hydroplane racer a long time ago. A powderpuff race was where all the guys let us girls use their great big boats to race each other, a fun time for us, an anxious time for them. When women started racing all the time, the powderpuff races were eliminated, which was a good thing because the last race run about half the field crashed, with some serious injuries.

Now I realize what a foolish event that was. Think about putting 10 or 12 inexperienced racers together at one time on a course, most going 60MPH or faster on boats made of 1/4 inch plywood on rough waters–all competing for the same spot at the same time.

I was reminded of this recently when it was suggested that a certain weblogging conference feature a session about women and weblogging, and used a lot of terms that pushed some deeply internal buttons. I would link to the event and provide a description of the terms, but the event has been cancelled, supposedly because of the negative feedback. Along with this was the originator’s quickly pulled declaration to never discuss this topic again.

What were the flashpoints for me? That we keep returning to the buzzsheets as the ultimate measure of our worth; that women were referred to as “chicks” and the meeting described using terms such as “pajama party”; that I was originally mentioned in context of this same meeting, making me wonder if the people who mentioned my name have even read me to even remotely consider that I would view a meeting of this nature and with these terms with anything other than chagrin.

Ultimately, though, the strongest flashpoint for me was that we keep boxing women, and by association, men for that matter, into these categories –women only write about personal stuff, men write about politics or technology. I hear sweeping statements made about how personal women are in our writings, how focused on family and friends, and poetry, and maybe even an occasional photo, or two. I hear, again and again, about how warm and nurturing women are, and the reason why we’re not higher up in the buzzsheets is not only because of what we write, but how we write. It’s said that we women aren’t aggressive enough: not only in our writing, but in our intereactions with each other.

However, this annoyance was a turn around for me, because I was one of those that used to talk about ‘women in blogging’ and bringing up the inherent sexist nature of the buzzsheets. How much did I talk about it? You only have to search my previous entries on feminism or sexism and you’ll see plenty of results, many of them related to weblogging.

I don’t regret writing on feminism or rights for women, but I do regret that I differentiated the women webloggers from the men, or women techs from men, because it served no useful purpose other than to classify women as a separate category – creating what was, to all intents and purposes, a powderpuff weblogging class. And just like that race long ago, doing this separation and categorization fosters an atmosphere of competition among the women, while the men sit back and laugh at the cat fights.

If we say that 50 spots on Technorati 100 have to be reserved for women, would all women then race for those spots and crash into each other in the process? What’s the fun of that? I’d rather loose every reader I have, or every weblogger I call friend, than to compete for any of them. There’s not a one that I will compete for–not a one–because I still remember what it felt like getting hit by a boat going 60MPH and having my hip crushed; I have no interest in replicating the event, virtually.

A nice thing about doing a retrospective of your past writing, is recognizing when you were wrong about something, while you still have a chance to rectify some of the damage. I did more harm than good by putting boxes around women webloggers, especially those in the technical field. I remember once, probably close to two years ago, when I pointed out photos showing little beyond white males and pointed out we should actively seek to include both women and men in gatherings of this nature. I was surprised when I had both female and black friends gently push back at my statement, and I couldn’t understand then why they did, but I do now.

By highlighting either a sex or a race, I wasn’t opening doorways to participation – I was highlighting the perceptions of differences.

Women write about personal things and men write about politics. Women are warm and nurturing, while men are more objective. Women communicate differently than men. These stereotypes are bullshit.

The men I read can be objective, political, and delightfully obnoxious, but they can also be sensitive and sensuous, or warm and nurturing when it comes to that. They don’t back down when something matters, and can hold their own. The thing is, the women I read are the same–or I don’t read them.

I’ve never seen Michele from a A Small Victory or Meryl Yourish shrink from a challenge, and Feministe is unflinching in her support for rights for women, world wide–and she gets some pretty nasty comments at time, but she doesn’t stop.

I remember Teresa Nielsen Hayden taking her fine editorial blue pencil to an email that chastized her for being critical of a writer. To his comment that most of the positive responses she gets are from people sucking up to her in her position as editor at Tor, she responded with:

I thought everybody knew by now that sucking up to editors isn�t cost-effective behavior. We can like you perfectly well, indeed love you dearly, without feeling the least obligation to buy your work; and then we�ll turn around and buy a book from a complete stranger, for no better reason than that we loved his book and didn�t love yours. Jim Frenkel was once approached at a convention by an attractive young lady, who said, approximately:

�Golly, Mr. Frenkel, I�d do anything to be a published author.�

�Anything?�

�Anything.�

�Then write me a good book.�

I loved her response, and I don’t write the type of books Tor publishes, so I’m not sucking up. Honest.

All of these women webloggers write about home and family, but they also write about work and politics and how life sucks at times. They can be warm and nurturing, but they can also blast the top layer of your skin off if you catch them on a bad day with a condescending attitutude.

They aren’t women weblogers. They’re just webloggers – no different than any of the dude webloggers out there, and for me to differentiate as I did in the past was just plain wrong.

Of course, with published hindsight also comes the inevitable responsiblity of admitting error, and I owe, among others, Meg Hourihan an apology for disregarding what she has been saying about women in technology. I can’t remember where she wrote the comment, but she once wrote that she helps women in technology by attending and speaking at technology conferences. I was on a full rant at the time, and blew it off. I can see now that I was wrong, and I owe Meg an apology because I was out of line.

(Lest Meg think I’ve been taken over by the pod people, note that I still disagree with her on many things.)

That’s the key: not only being seen, but being heard. In the upcoming blogging conference, women shouldn’t split off a separate session to talk about women in blogging. They should attend all of the sessions, sit up front, and make themselves heard. That’s worth ten times what we’ve done for women in weblogging with all our writing on the subject.

Julia Lerman has done more by talking about .NET technologies, and Gina and Meg did more by developing Kinja, and Dori Smith does more, and the list goes on, including my own efforts with RSS and Atom, RDF, and weblogging software.

Women webloggers are no different than men webloggers. We don’t need to be treated special; we’re not going to break apart if what we say is criticized, and we give back as good as we get. I don’t have weblog sisters unless I also have weblog brothers and I’m not related to any of you other than through admiration and respect (or acrimony and loathing because I do speak my mind, and note to the acrimonious: get over it).

If women want to differentiate themselves, more power to them. They can call themselves bitch, mother, crone, or babe , and it has nothing to do with the rest of us. Guys have been calling themselves bastards, stud, or grumpy old men for years and we don’t take this as a classification of the gender as a whole.

Time to kill the myth of the powderpuff webloggers–we’re all in the same race, now.

Categories
Weblogging

But I like the box better

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

When I started this weblog three years ago, it was a continuation of my web site that I’ve had since 1995. As such, it focused primarily on technology, with an occasional aside into science or art or literature. I started with a free Manila-based weblog hosted by Userland, which was removed sometime last year, probably because it hadn’t been updated for so long. I regret now that I didn’t copy some of the entries, but not too much because I didn’t really write anything special during that time.

In my first few months, I rarely wrote just to write, to be a writer; I was intimidated by the medium. Unlike my other writing, in articles and books and online, weblogging lacked abstraction. I could view the statistics and watch the numbers of readers rise and fall and realized that there was a core of readers who would come by daily who didn’t do so because they followed a link to a tutorial or found a page from a search engine – they were returning to read me, and I didn’t know who they were.

It became a game with me to write a few posts in a certain manner or on certain topics and then watch the statistics to see if my readership would increase or fall off. I wasn’t writing, though I was using words to the best of my ability; I was fishing, and trying different bait. Moreso, I was trying to carve my space into a small audience amidst others who were famous (at least within this subculture), or very talented, and occasionally both.

Among these others, the first weblogger I started reading was Dave Winer, but I eventually connected up with the Cluetrain gang through the writings of Chris Locke, otherwise known as Rageboy. This was back before 9/11, the event that sent Americans scrambling for guns under their beds, flags to hang from their trucks, and made weblogging what it is today. (At least, until some other pivotal moment that will make weblogging what it is today, tomorrow.)

Back then, in 2001 we were trying to understand what weblogs were, and to me, they were all about the writing. I wrote the following, till preserved at Rageboy’s site:

Within these things called weblogs there are gems of creativity and brilliance that take my breath away. There’s writing that’s so good that I feel gifted with the words.

Sometimes the people who write the weblogs are known; most of the time, they aren’t. Doesn’t matter, though. All that should matter is the writing. It’s the words that count – everything else is just fluff, sparkle, and zazz.

That was in November of 2001 during the time of the infamous Blogmatch between Winer and Locke, which focused on the question of that time: what is a weblog. Winer said that …weblogs are rational writing, that’s why it’s so close, if you’re serious about it, to academic writing. To which Locke responds with:

There are two things I want most in life. The first is to be taken seriously. The second is to be mistaken for an academic. No wait, there are three. The third is to set my hair on fire.

Today Dave Winer works for Harvard and hosts BloggerCons and talks about weblogs and politics; while Chris Locke paints posts with pictures, some naughty, some nice, about narcissim and new age cranks, pulling words reluctantly from the page like a fisherman heaves fish, line caught and fighting, into a boat. (And Voidstar preserved the Blogmatch, to which we owe him, “Thanks”. )

Through Chris I was introduced to another Chris, otherwise known as Stavors the Wonder Chicken. Today Chris/Stavros appears in an Empty Bottle but back then it was Waeguk Wasn’t Soup.:

I don’t beat small children senseless, although I have been known to swallow them whole when they cross my bridge without permission.

I should clarify what is no doubt an overwhelming impression that I hate Korea. I don’t. Well, sometimes I do, goddamnit, but it’s more complicated than that. I do hate the chaos, the filth, the racism and casual cruelty, but there are scores of Korean people I just love to bits. I live in hell. My Liver is a big, misshapen bubbly fat-encrusted abomination that keeps functioning through sheer power of will I’m grumpy. Old Korean men – fuck, how I hate them with a white-hot eye-popping passion. I’ve got no problem with people eating dogs, if they want to. Shit, I’ve done it.

I’m afraid I’ve walked through the portal into bizarro-world.

Sometimes, my mind reels. Other times it just kinda sashays around, coyly. Sometimes I surprise myself. I don’t fucking know.That’s cool with me. I’m pure misanthrope, with enough scorn to go around for all of humanity. At the same time, love love love. It’s weird being me.

As Chris Locke would say, What a pleasure to read good writing once in a while, even if it does make you want to puke.

(Others concur because our Chicken is now destined for fame and glory, and it behooves us to toddle on over to his place and put in links to our favorite ravings from that grumpy old man with the pickled liver who doesn’t swallow children whole.)

What are weblogs is a question that keeps re-appearing over time, and as new webloggers come along who begin to question the format and all the written and unwritten rules. The issue of what is a weblog splits into two major categories: what makes a proper weblog, and what makes a proper weblogger. Over the last three years, I’ve watched both being defined and redefined again and again, and have spent, as I look back now, an inordinate amount of time defending weblogs against proper weblogging etiquette and form and webloggers from being classified as everything from political activists to citizen journalists.

The question of weblog form has resurfaced again this week, when Eric Meyer of CSS fame wrote that Weblogs are temporarily broken. He based this posting on the reverse chronological order of our front pages, and started a conversation carried by other webloggers including an odd one by Scoble about just wanting to know that the rabbit was eaten being good enough.

The proper form for a weblog was a large topic of discussion once long ago based on an article that Meg Hourihan wrote for O’Reilly titled What We’re Doing When We Blog. In it, Meg started out promisingly with the following, in response to American Journalism Review article:

In her article, Catherine forgoes the more traditional weblogs-are-links-plus-commentary definition to carve out a new meaning for the word, limited to the type of blogs she reads. But Catherine’s analysis misses some of the very subtleties that distinguish weblogs from other writing. Rather than rant that Catherine just “doesn’t get it,” it seems to me that her article, and others that are similar, are perfect opportunities for the blogging community to talk about our own evolution.

But then wrote:

If we look beneath the content of weblogs, we can observe the common ground all bloggers share – the format. The weblog format provides a framework for our universal blog experiences, enabling the social interactions we associate with blogging. Without it, there is no differentiation between the myriad content produced for the Web.

The article received almost universal acclaim, but I wasn’t one of the admiring crowd. I wrote a critical essay but then I pulled it based on some misplaced sense of honor, which I’ve since shed – not the honor, but that honor could be misplaced. However, others also responded including Stavros, (and here), Jonathon Delacour, and Jeff Ward.

Stavros wrote:

How tedious is this, how perfunctory and lacking of any sense of the mad, wild spirit of creativity that is tearing through the souls of (fill in the names or pseudonyms of your favorite bloggers here)? Sorry, Meg, but this piece strikes me as soulless, by-the-numbers, and regrettably keen to dumb things down as much as possible, custom-designed for Big Media to understand and quote it. Calculated to be Just what the Market Wants.

Like me and Stavros, Jonathon Delacour was also struck by the reduction of weblogging to the format, writing in a post (that’s since been pulled from his active archive, proving yet again that old posts never fade away, as long as they live in the memories of your readers–dammit):

Just like those photo-technicians, Meg Hourihan defines blogging in terms of the format: reverse-chronological and time-stamped. In this sterile depiction, the key elements of a blogging post are the links, the time-stamp, and the permalink.

God give me strength. I could describe a Walker Evans photograph by saying that it was taken with a Zeiss Protar lens on a tripod-mounted 8 x 10 Deardorff view camera, at f/45 to maximize the depth of field and with a G filter to emphasize the clouds. All of which is true but, frankly, who gives a shit? Such a description refuses to acknowledge that Evans’ image of a highway corner in Reedsville, West Virginia in 1936 is not just visually complex and gorgeous to look at. Evans’ radical approach to picture-making subverted many of his contemporaries- most deeply ingrained beliefs about pictorial beauty and the purpose of documentary photography.

Which is not to say there’s no place for an explanation of the mechanics of weblogging: tools, posts, links, time-stamps, permalinks. But wouldn’t it be better to leave those prosaic details for later? And to start by mapping out an imaginative vision of the medium’s potential?

Jeff Ward, though, likened weblogging format to a grammar, which in the end fosters a new form of communication. Returning to Jonathon’s photography analogy, Jeff wrote:

The technology of photography is indeed of great importance, for example, in examining how the small hand-held camera and high speed films fundamentally changed the content of photography. In a mature medium, these questions are less important. But still, Walker Evans’s nearly recursive move back into heavy view cameras deeply effected the character of the images he produced, when contrasted to his street photography with roll-film cameras. The grammar of the machine affects the content. I gave up infrared photography largely for the reasons Jonathon suggested; people didn’t care about the photographs, only the technology. But, how old is blogging? Shouldn’t we be asking precisely these sort of questions?

Weblog as format continued to surface from time to time in other contexts. There is the issue of the long-format webloggers as compared to the linkers (the link/comment blogging), and what is or is not “good weblog writing”. Halley Suitt recently discussed this:

With a new project I’m working on, I am teaching some non-bloggers how to blog and it’s really interesting to show someone the ropes. I have a whole different attitude about blogging than I used to.

For instance, I think brevity is the soul of blog wit more than ever. Look at my archives and see some of my first year’s worth of posts – too too long and ponderous I think.

Short and sweet – the best blog is a fresh blog full of lots of little posts.

Halley did not get universal agreement for her ’short and sweet’ assertion, and she would later point out examples of longer writing that she felt were acceptable. However, if you ask many old time webloggers what a weblog post is, they’ll say it’s a link to something interesting, with a short comment, no matter how many of us fill pages and pages with writing (causing all sorts of havoc with weblog tools finetuned for links and blurbs).

How much we syndicate is another issue of format that has occupied much of our writing. In this case of proper weblogging format those of us who provide excerpts in our syndication feeds are pushed to provide full feeds. The reason is that others who link to hundreds, thousands, of webloggers can then read many thoughts at a single gulp, disregarding carefully maintained weblog appearances, thoughtfully crafted writing, and how can one differentiate so many voices compressed into one simple aggregator.

Or as I wrote in The Gluttony of Information:

Rather than fight information overload, give in to it. Embrace it. Accept complete saturation as nothing less than that which is to be achieved. Apply the same practices to our consumption of information as we’ve applied to food and consumer goods and foreign policy, because we can never have too much.

After all this reading about RSS today, I finally get it. I finally understand the magic:

RSS is the both the McDonald’s and Wal-Mart of data”

(And then there’s the topic of RSS 2.0 and RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 and Atom. I have so many writings on these that I can’t link to all of them – you can just search on Atom to get a feel for how much this has impacted on my writing. What would we write about, if we didn’t have RSS and Atom?)

Proper form, short and sweet, aggregated and conjoined: sometimes the demands of the weblogging medium have grown so large, and the format so important that I’m reminded of a time my mother received a present for Christmas one year that was beautifully wrapped. It had gorgeous paper and an intricate paper flower surrounded by glittery ribbons of many colors. After opening it and seeing what was inside, some silly knick knack, she laughed and said, “I think I’ll toss the gift and keep the box”.

I wrote the following April, 2002, in a post titled My Weblog has Fallen Down:

A weblogger’s nightmare:

I am looking at a weblog page with a Google box to the right and a NY Times box to the left and several buttons with coffee mugs all over them that generate OPML, RSS, and various other assorted and sundry XML flavors. Within the page there is this outline with links and plus signs and you click on the plus signs and the content is expanded to show even more outlines, which can expand to even more outlines, and on and on and on.

And I see myself hunting desperately through the page knowing if I look hard enough, deep enough, I will find the truth. I will find what the weblogger has to say.

Finally, after I click enough of the little plus signs, and get rid of all these boxes that keep opening up and tell Google to shut the fuck up for just one second, I find it.

Hear the words of The Weblogger:

You are The Doc Searls Weblog!
You are located at http://doc.weblogs.com/

You are rather jolly. You write a lot of geeky stuff. You are so fond of penguins that you edit a journal about them.

At which point my head implodes from one mind bomb too many, and the weblog falls over and the Internet gets sucked up into this huge black hole and the universe as we know it ceases to exist.

What is a proper weblog. Might as well ask, what is proper writing and hope to find a universal answer that will satisfy everyone. Or as I wrote wrote in April, 2002:

We’ll never know what is or is not good weblog writing, because the writing is as unique as the number of writers, as good as the worst of us and as poor as the best. We define the rules and we can break the rules, and the first rule we break is to throw out all our assumptions about ‘what is good writing’.

Categories
Burningbird Weblogging

Gimme plenty of this and that but hold the burn cuz I forgot the antacid

My three year weblogging anniversary is on April 5th, I believe. I can’t exactly remember the day and the old weblog, an old hosted Manila weblog, has long since gone from lack of updates. But the 5th is close enough.

Three years slaying dragons. Three years tilting at windmills.

Three years. That’s a long time, or at least, it feels like it’s been a long time. If I had applied myself and this were a university, I would have a degree now. If the words were added together and bound, I’d have at least a couple of books. If the photos were printed and mounted, I’d have several shows. If the technology expended were applied to a project, I’d have at least one weblogging tool, possibly an aggregator or two, and the RDF Poetry Finder completed. If I’d been paid for the time, I’d be rich. If the people I’ve met were all in the same room, I’d have a huge party, though I may have to keep my back to the wall at times – I haven’t always been complimentary, nor have I always kept quiet when I should all things being equal. (Note to self at anniversary party: remove sharp knives, and provide plastic forks and chop sticks with dull ends. Lots of booze, but provide juice for those who have quit. Drinking that is, not weblogging.)

Dave Rogers (who has had a weblog since 1999, that old weblogging fart) recently said something on knowing when to keep quiet, but I can’t find the post. He said that we don’t always have to fight the fights; we don’t always have to respond or take issue with everything that comes along. However, he also says, But what do I know? That should be a tagline we’re all forced to wear in our spaces, like the slave standing behind the triumphant returning general, whispering into the hero’s ears as he’s hailed by the masses, Thou art mortal. Thou art mortal.

(By the way, I ‘own’ these words in Google. Ah, such is the intimacy between Google and Weblogs, another subject I’ve discussed here many a time. Remember ‘googlewhacking”? Well, from the site that fish has done been chewed and the sharks have moved on. )

For the next week in celebration of my three years anniversary, I’m combining equal parts old and new, something borrowed, and too many things blue, to create my own party mix; to see where I’ve been, and where I’m at, and where I want to go. Yeah, one of those historical perspective things–somewhat like the slide shows you had to sit through at the neighborhood parties when you were a kid. Feel free to skip the week if you wish.

Among the old will be links to past posts, mine and others, that have impacted me, good and bad. With each, through the magic of hindsight and semi-permanent archives, I’m going to give a contemporary take on the whatever the subject was, or should I say, is.

I’ll also be republishing favorite photos; my favorite photos, not necessarily the ones that others have liked. In addition, I’ll be providing at least one post with links to articles and technical how-tos from the past that could still be useful, but have disappeared into the archives and become difficult to find.

That’s the old. For the new, I’ve been discussing future book ideas with Simon St. Laurent, and Simon sent representative examples of several new and existing book ‘brands’ that O’Reilly is now publishing. I was rather amazed at how far the company has come from just being the publisher of the popular ‘animal books’, so I’m going to be reviewing one or two in each of the brands–what I like about the books, and whether I could see myself writing a book within the brand. You learn about some nifty books, and I learn more about myself as a writer. What goodness.

Interspersed throughout all of this will be some writings about Walker Evans. Reading about his life has made me take a closer look at mine. And that’s about all I can say on this for now.

Sound fun? Yes? No? Doesn’t really matter what you think, though, does it? After all, in our spaces, it’s all about us.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

TypeKey: Final act

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Six Apart has released its pre-launch’ FAQ about TypeKey, and everything I expected about the service has been confirmed. I have no doubts that when MT 3.0 releases, we’ll see masses of people rush to enable TypeKey in their weblogs so they rest assured at night that only the proper sort of comments need appear when they are not there to maintain the necessary vigilance to protect their weblogging homes from dastardly introducers.

Discussing the issues of registration and centralization, comment spam prevention, centralization and performance, privacy, baby squirrels, and social issues, in turn:

Registration and centralization

If you want comment registration with Movable Type or TypePad, you will have to use TypeKey. As the FAQ says, if we want comment registration without TypeKey, then we’ll have to …build our own authentication system. The problem with building authentication, as with any other sercurity aspect of an application, is that it needs to be designed and incorporated right from the start; an addon registration system for a tool built to use something else is not something I want to contemplate having to maintain as Movable Type goes through new variations, open APIs or not.

If Movable Type were open source, I could understand this. And before you point out the nature of Perl, open code is not open source.

The reasons for having a centralized registration system, frankly, don’t make a lot of sense. Six Apart states that:

TypeKey takes care of the hassle of running an authentication service: building the service itself; keeping it running; dealing with users who have forgotten their username or password; verifying the email address of new users; etc. All of these tasks are managed for you by TypeKey.

I imagine if you’re a weblog that gets hundreds of new commenters a day, having a service take care of authenticating an email address would be valuable. Now, those of you who get hundreds of new commenters a day, raise your hand?

Other than that, the aspects of registration that Six Apart mention for TypeKey are built into other products, quite simply, and this includes WordPress and a host of other weblogging tools. The commenter may on occasion have to give an answer to a question to recover a password; or if the tool doesn’t provide an automated registration recovery procedure (which it should, that’s not difficult to add in), we may have to reset a person’s password manually for them, but frankly, people using software that manages registration locally has been around on the Web since it was not much beyond a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye.

(And an added benefit with local registration – break into a local system, and you compromise one weblog or site; break into a global system, and you compromise everyone’s.)

As for managing multiple usernames and passwords form weblog to weblog, well, please. We use our email addresses for each username, and we use the same password at each, or a variation of a password based on the weblog name and our naming scheme. Not as secure to use same password? Well, sure, but we’re not talking about our bank accounts here – we’re just talking about comment systems and keeping comment spammers out.

Comment spam prevention

Authentication and registration is not a infalliable solution to comment spammers. Just think of the new offshore possibilities – hire people in countries to sign up for email addresses, get authenticated in the TypeKey system, place innocuous comments at sites until they’re allowed in, and then one fine night – blitz ‘em!

No comment registration system, TypeKey or otherwise, will be able to deliberately keep out all spammers. Fortunately Movable Type does have better comment management, with being able to delete comments by name, IP address, and URL, and this is good, this is something we have been asking for. However, I also see no evidence that throttles have been incorporated into the code to prevent trackback and comment DoS (Denial of Service) attacks, so this will continue to be a problem, even with Movable Type 3.0. Unless we hack the code, and the thought of having to hack the code before the product is even out is just too much at this point.

By the way, what about trackback?

Centralization and performance

Having a centralized registration system for a centralized weblogging tool makes sense. After all the weblog posts, comment builds, and every other aspect of the weblog is managed centrally, why not the comment registration? But there is no good technical reason for going with a centralized service for what are distributed weblogs. There are probably good commercial reasons, but none from a technical or even individual user’s point of view.

We who went to Movable Type or other product that we host on our own servers did so specifically because we did NOT want to have any form of dependency on a centralized system. We did so, for the most part, because we have been burned on either performance or access because of the centralization and scaling problems. TypeKey is no different, and in some ways, potentially worse than any of the other centralized tools that we use.

Think of it– for web sites that use centralized comment registration, every comment has to be authenticated with TypeKey. Now think about how many comments are being written at any moment in time?

Six Apart mentions the performance aspect of TypeKey, saying:

We are committed to offering a solution that has as little customer-facing downtime as possible. Of course, we can never guarantee 100% uptime. It’s in Six Apart’s best interest to keep TypeKey up and functioning and to keep our users happy. In the case of downtime, there will be fall-back options in place to help guarantee a fairly seamless commenting process. That means downtime of the TypeKey service would not necessarily mean that spammers and abusive comments could get through nor that commenters would not be able to comment. We’ll have more information about how this will work nearer to the release.

Which frankly tells me they haven’t worked through a solution on this aspect yet, and that doesn’t bode well for the use of this service.

When building a new web-enabled application with any of the clients I had when I was a technical architect, the first aspect we would build into the system was security. You have to build security from the ground up. It must be incorporated into the very design of the product, from its first conceptualization, it can never be an ‘add-on’. Added security never works as efficiently, or as effectively as security integrated deeply with the product.

Mark Pilgrim came out with a weakly satirical rant making fun of what several of us have had to say about TypeKey (after first making disparaging ethnocentric comments about our writing to our weblogs during the ‘weekends’ based on his own interpretation of same; in an international environment, no less)– including Six Apart’s own announcement of Movable Type 3.0.

(I can see, in all seriousness, why Mark would make fun of us for spending time talking about this. After all, it’s just technology. Why get worked up over technology? We never get worked up over technology such as RSS and Atom and RDF and the Semantic Web, that sort of thing.)

The only technical aspect I can pull out of his writing to address is that he lists several centralized systems that he believes do scale well and serve the community, and it’s true these have managed to scale and are useful, but each and every one has failed when I’ve tried to access it at least once a week.

Blogdex was inaccessible off and on this weekend, and Technorati was hard to access last night, and I couldn’t access Bloglines two or thee times last week, and I got some kind of odd error with Radio comments a couple of weeks ago, too, and, well, the list goes on. The problem with centralized systems is not that they fail completely and breakdown permanently; it’s that they behave oddly or inconsistently, or poorly under load.

Time out. Ever get a time out when accessing a centralized system?

But the thing with Technorati or Blogdex or Bloglines (I haven’t used Feedster) is that I’m not dependent on them to write to my weblog, or for my commenters to respond, or for my pages to be accessed. Only my own system resources, or the Internet in general between my server and each of us can impact on this. With TypeKey, though, that’s changed.

Now, not only we’ll we have to write out blog posts in Notepad or some other local application to prevent losing them when we can’t access our hosted or remote weblogging applications; we’ll have to do the same with comments, too.

(Though I imagine that Six Apart will create a caching subsystem that will cache authenticated comments for publishing when the TypeKey system is accessible again – you’ll just have to wait for the remote system to continue your discussion is all.)

Why would we go through all the hassle to have a distributed application if we’re going to tie into a centralized authentication system? Might as well go to TypePad for the rest of our weblogging needs.

(But I don’t want Mark to go away not thinking that we’re not appreciative of his efforts. As he said in one weblog comment: what’s the fuss? After all it’s just a public announcement of a new technology? Sure, I can agree with that – and Atom is just another alpha release of yet another syndication format. No big deal.)

Privacy

I have no doubts that Six Apart won’t publish my personal information, just as I have no doubts that they won’t do something with the aggregate data. All that juicy information about which sites getting how many comments; and then there’s plenty of ego-stroking aspects to the application. If we think that we’re too fixated on buzzsheets such as Technorati 100, wait until we see what can be done with comments.

I’m not particularly concerned about the system being hacked into to get my individual information, though I imagine email spammers will attempt to do so to farm all of the email addresses contained in the system. However, from a security stand point, this is a bright red target in a field of beige – I have no doubts that crackers will be at that system to crack just so they can flood our comments with a crapflood of bogus comments, using our login information, as they use our IP addresses as proxy for their attacks today.

And won’t that be a hell of a mess to clean up?

Baby Squirrels

Aside from these specific technical issues, one other issue I have is the trust releationship we have have established with Ben and Mena Trott, our friends and neighbors, being carried over into our dealings with Six Apart, the company.

It’s important to remember when judging whether to buy into the use of TypeKey for your site is that Six Apart is no longer ‘Ben and Mena’. It is an international company, with international investors and multiple employees, and business concerns that influence the company’s direction. This isn’t to knock that Six Apart has become successful – more power to the company! This is to make a point that we can no longer judge the use of any product, even the ‘free’ ones, from Six Apart, as if they are given to us by Ben and Mena, sitting in their apartments, writing the code in their spare time.

I have heard some good and valid defenses of TypeKey from sites who plan on using it, or some other form of comment registration and authentication because of the nature of topics covered at their sites. These people can attract all sorts of racist and bigoted people, and they want to ensure that if a person is going to make comments such as these, they can at least be authenticated to an email address.

But much of the pushback against those of us raising technical and social concerns has been based on a personalization of the technology and the Six Apart company.

In the MeFil thread on TypeKey, one person wrote:

SixApart is the Apple of the blog world–they take the time during development to make robust, stable apps (TypePad and MT are both solid, and both spreading like wildfire as a result) and they do it with enough style and digital sex appeal to make it consistently-appealing (if not downright Pavlovian) to the crucial early adopter set.

So naturally, let the chorus of haters begin.

Just so long as the haters are Typekey-authenticated, of course.

Another wrote:

Really, who can argue that a centralized, secured, open registration system for weblogs is better than distributing a registation system into thousands of individual weblogs that never update their software? It just doesn’t make sense. Think of all the fun customer support issues that could arise from handing loud bloggers a complicated registation system. Besides, everyone loves typing their information into weblogs over and over again.

Of course, it’s not like there blogging systems out there that are focused on small closed communtities. Well, there’s livejournal, but they don’t meet my exact needs either. I mean, why should I have to switch blogging software or do any work when Six Apart should be reading my mind and meeting my needs exactly for free.

Don’t they realize that the people that read my site are so dumb that though they can use a computer, check email, and surf the web, there is no possible way they could remember a username and password. No other website makes people remember a username and password!

What is this world coming to when companies try to plan ahead and think broadly instead of catering to the loudest whiner? Egads, you’d think that I’m not the most important person in the world.

Why the sarcasm? Why the issues of hatred?

The problem is that we can’t discuss this from a technical perspective because we’re talking “Ben and Mena” here, and there are a lot of complicated factors in work. There’s Six Apart’s support for Atom when others have supported RSS; there’s the fact that Ben and Mena are, were, are webloggers just like the rest of us; that they provided Movable TYpe for free, and did start out by coding in their home, in their spare time; there’s the fact that a lot of people have met Ben and Mena, and like them, and I’m sure they are very nice, and personable.

But Six Apart is not ‘Ben and Mena”. Being critical of TypeKey is not attacking Ben and Mena. And choosing to use TypeKey should not be based on trusting Ben And Mena.

Personalizing the Tech: the social in social software

It’s not surprising that a personalization of the TypeKey has entered our discussions. The thing with social software, such as weblogging software, is that personalization will always be one of the factors in its design, no matter how much we try to ‘de-personalize’ the tech.

With TypeKey enabled at a weblog for all comments, either you register with this centralized service, or you don’t comment. But if we have good comment management and good throttles enabled to prevent comment spam, why would we use comment registration such as TypeKey? I’ve read that it’s to prevent comment spammers, but we know with current workarounds that we don’t need registration to manage comment spammers.

From what I’m hearing, now, that’s not the issue for registration. People are talking about filtering out ‘negative’ comments, and commenters who say ‘hateful’ things. The Six Apart FAQ talks about this:

Now Alice goes to Carol’s weblog. Carol also allows comments by registered users only. Alice signs in using her existing TypeKey account and posts a comment to Carol’s weblog, which goes into Carol’s moderation queue, because this is Alice’s first comment on his weblog.

But Alice hates Carol, so she left a nasty comment! Carol receives the comment via email, doesn’t like the tone of it. So she logs into Movable Type and bans Alice from posting comments to his weblog.

Damn, folks, but nasty is relative. Since the beginning of this year I have been labeled as vicous, nasty, rude, negative, and about everything you can think of. Not because I’m using names, or even personal attacks, but because I have used a specific tone of voice, or an abrupt way of speaking; I have used sarcasm and satire in responding; I have said negative things about what a person has written. Recently, a tone was even implied because I used the person’s last name, rather than their first to address them!

(As a personal aside, am I getting tired of passive aggressive types chastizing my behavior, as if they were Mom or Dad, and I the wayward child? You god damn right I’m getting tired of it. More on this in a later writing.)

Now any comment registration system will keep me out of a weblog, and TypeKey is no different than a local system. I’m not making a statement against TypeKey, now, as much as I am against comment registration; against a growing trend that I’m seeing within the weblogging world to put up barriers and filters around our spaces so that we may control not only what’s discussed within our writing, but within the comments we attach to our spaces.

Combine this with never linking to contrary viewpoints, or disparging same based on some group affiliation or at the behest of some A-lister who we’re sucking up to, and eventually we can still the voices and if we’re successful enough, the people speaking will lose heart and just go away and leave us alone.

Is this where we want to go with this brave new world?

Never say never

In my one weblogging post, I deliberately used a provocative title of “Patriot Act of Weblogging” to discuss TypeKey, and I received criticism for this, as I expcted. However, for the most part, the reason why I used this title seems to have been lost.

In my opinion, the Patriot Act was an overcompensation based on fear and a reaction to being attacked. Through it our freedoms have been curtailed, though many people feel that the added security is worth it. To me, TypeKey is based on the same principles, though of course the similarities between events are far, far different. There is no horrible and sudden loss of life, and no frightening and insiduous curtailment of civil rights, and my use of this term should be, rightfully, called on because of this.

There is a hint, though, of the same overcompensation – a reaction against being ‘attacked’, a pulling in of our heads, like the turtle into its shell, an all or nothing to both events that when I first read the TypeKey announcement, my initial reaction was that it was the Patriot Act of weblogging.

(All or nothing. Hmmm. Sounds like a good title for an essay on communication and barriers, doesn’t it?)

TypeKey is all or nothing. Not using TypeKey in my weblog doesn’t end TypeKey’s influence on me. I said I would never register with TypeKey, which means never commenting at TypeKey enabled sites. Never say never, the saying goes, but for me, never means just that – never.

Feel free to TypeKey protect your comment systems and know that I for one will not be commenting there, and perhaps that makes you even happier about TypeKey. Of course, I’ve also instigated lively discussions in your comments at times, or about your posts, but that’s beside the point. The important thing is that you have complete and utter control over who says what in your space, and that’s all that matters.

Be nice, or be gone

Be nice, or be gone someone said to me recently.

Odd thing, weblogs and comments. We say to each other, “Our weblogs are our homes and we should be able to control what’s said in them”. Yet, they aren’t our homes, are they? You don’t keep your door open for anyone to just walk in to your home, do you? Weblogs are published online supposedly because we want a broader audience for our thoughts and writing then just our friends and family.

They aren’t really our ‘homes’, and the analogy fails in so many ways, but they are our spaces, so we have a right to control them and hold people who comment accountable, don’t we?

But who holds us accountable? I’ve seen again and again, the weblogger write the most inflammatory material in an essay, and when you respond to the tone they set in their writing, or to their responses to your earlier comments, you’re told to be nice, or be gone.

We say, commenters should be held accountable for what they say. I say, but then, who holds the weblogger accountable?

Be nice, or be gone.

I guess I and all the other troublesome, negative, critical, contrary, rude, nasty, vicious, and dissenting voices that you see as graffiti on the wall will be gone, and though we can write in our own weblogs, we’ll never be part of the conversations. Free to speak, true; but not to be part of a discussion; on the outside looking in through the window at the party, trying to be heard through the thick panes. After a while though, shouting in the street gets discouraging and disheartening, and perhaps some day we’ll just be gone for good.

Just think, though: when we’re gone, you won’t need TypeKey. That’s great, isn’t it?

Categories
Technology Weblogging

TypeKey scavenger hunt

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

More information about TypeKey and comment management incorporated into Movable Type 3.0 is appearing, but it’s appearing in bits and pieces in certain weblog comments.

In BuzzMachine comments Mena Trott wrote:

Our announcement about the TypeKey service was focused on the TypeKey service, not the way we’ll be handling comment registration. But, without going into too much detail, I will say that we’re not starting this service in order to police or ban users. From a liability standpoint alone, it doesn’t make sense. Movable Type 3.0 has a robust comment registration system that allows the user to ban or accept users on their own weblog. TypeKey is a way to say “this person has an account and has entered a verfied email”–now you, as the weblog owner, will decide how you will handle this commenter.

We operate in California, a state where the legal system advocates personal privacy. We feel the same way, so of course, we’re not going to be providing a public list of all the blogs you’re commenting on without explicit user approval.

And regarding the subpoena issue: While Ben and myself founded Six Apart and the company still reflects our vision, we are a company that has counsel and if and when these situations come up, we follow legal guidelines. This certainly doesn’t mean just handing over user data.

Six Apart didn’t just decide to create TypeKey on a whim. We weighed the pluses and pros of both decentralized and centralized registration. Believe me, the decision didn’t happen overnight. Ultimately, the need to not sign up on every weblog you wish to comment on and the ability to say that your TypeKey identity is your own (rather than having decentralized comment registration where someone could possibly snap up your identity on a particular weblog) were two of the major issues that made us choose a centralized authentication system.

We’re going to want to compile a list of questions that people may have and add those to our FAQ. But, ultimately, we’ll want to get the product out of alpha before answering too many speculative questions 🙂
Posted by Mena Trott at March 20, 2004 03:16 PM

I can respect that Six Apart is in the middle of a development cycle, but the architecture for TypeKey is obviously designed, and the topic has been introduced with just enough information to cause confusion and concern. I’m not sure that waiting to answer questions is a feasible idea for the company. Nor is putting bits and pieces of additional information in some weblogs.

Mena is saying, “Trust us”, and asking us to trust her and Ben because they’ve been a part of this community, and have been helpful in the past, and have provided software for free for many of us. I imagine that many of you know the Trotts personally, and are very uncomfortable when talking about ‘trust’ and ‘abuse’ when referencing them.

But TypeKey is not ‘Ben and Mena” – it’s Six Apart, a company, as both the Trott’s have stressed, that has impacted on their communications and their decisions in the past. A company that the Trotts could decide to sell for a couple of million tomorrow to some major international corporation, and more power to them.

John’s Jottings has pulled together several other weblog entries on MT 3.0 and TypeKey, and it was through his effort that I found out Jay Allen has bought into TypeKey as a solution, and is discontinuing future mt-blacklist updates. As he writes:

When I saw the original feature list, I was highly skeptical that this release would solve the problem. However, SixApart did such a fantastic and elegant job of looking at the problem from a wider perspective that I was instantly won over. This new version completely solves the problem of control over outside submission to one�s blog in such an elegant and powerful way that I myself was astounded.

I can understand Jay wanting to move on – he isn’t paid for mt-blacklist other than through donations. And I’m also not surprised that he would favor a system that would basically prohibit comment posting unless you authorize the person making the comments, and the person has been ‘authenticated’. As with blacklisting, better to lose a few good comments, then run the risk of comment spam or trolls. Which means comment registration and an authentication service, which is TypeKey.

But many of us have never been comfortable with the blacklist feature of MT-blacklist, because as we’ve seen, it was abused and legitimate URLs were added to global blacklists. What we liked, what I liked, was Jay Allen’s nicely elegant email integration for managing comments, and his global comment deletion and entry re-build feature. With enhancements added to throttle the individual DoS (Denial of Service) attacks we’ve suffered from poorly designed comment spam systems, or deliberately from script kiddies, we’ve managed to gain control for the most part on our comments, with only a little effort on our part.

It does sound like some of this has been added to Movable Type 3.0, as I discovered when Ben Trott added a comment to hebig.org/blog:

Hi,

TypeKey is definitely not the only new feature in MT 3–it’s only a part of the release, and in fact, in our original announcement at http://www.movabletype.org/news/2004_03.shtml#000912 it was barely even mentioned.

But as you said, comment registration is not for everyone, and to help out folks who don’t want to use it, we’ve also vastly improved MT’s comment management functionality: you can now look up “all comments by this author”, “all comments from this IP address”, etc, and bulk delete those comments. This is really powerful when combined with comment registration, of course, but even without using comment registration, the tools are much more powerful than in MT 2.x.

With regards to scalability: we’ve now implemented one of the major scalability improvements in TypePad into Movable Type–speeding up the archive list generation by using the MySQL or PostgreSQL processing engine rather than MT.

Finally, as far as features go: another one of the major changes in MT3 is the callback interface, which exposes much more of MT’s internal processing to plugin modules. This allows plugin developers to build large application functionality on top of Movable Type, and we’re hoping to see some really interesting tools get built, because we know that by this point, when there are hundreds of plugins up on http://www.mt-plugins.org/ , there are many people besides Six Apart building interesting things with Movable Type. 🙂

Ben

I think from this we can infer that if you use comment registration in Movable Type 3.0, you have to tie into TypeKey – there is no separate solution.

Of course, I’ve already been talking with another developer about hacking the code to either use locally-based authentication, or no authentication, and I’m sure others are thinking the same – which means we have yet another round of hacked code so that we don’t have to tie into this centralized authentication scheme.

On a MeFi thread, Matt Haughey says of TypeKey:

It seems on the surface to be a sort of weblog-world Microsoft Passport. I once had a chat with the original creator of Passport, face-to-face, and he asked why I didn’t use it for MetaFilter (since it would eliminate a lot of programming for user management). I stated that I didn’t due to security risks, the integrity of the data, and the inherent mistrust of the company behind it. I believe Six Apart has to deal with the same sorts of issues, but I trust their security is tight, I trust that they won’t do evil things with our data, and I trust them as a company.

I think this is a good option for people that are currently turning off their blog comments due to the deluge of spam. If the choice is no comments vs. register with Typekey comments, we as readers and owners win if Typekey is adopted. Heck, I’m tired of deleting the 1 or 2 a day that show up to my open commented Typepad and MT blogs and will seriously consider moving to registered comments only for those blogs.

There is definitely a danger in having a central store of data and taking any actions against accounts in that central store. I hope that Typekey is as transparent as possible in what they do to abusive accounts and why they do it. Of course this is all based on that single info page – perhaps typekey will never ban users system-wide and it will be up to site owners to ban users one by one (though it would be nice if there was a trusted central spammer db like mt-blacklist). But the danger is that if one person is accidentally banned from typekey comments, there could be a lot of problems.

To me, deleting one or two comments a day, especially if the tools are easy, doesn’t bother me. I figured it’s the cost of doing business, and worth it to keep my comments open for those good, but anonymous, comments that come my way every once in a while. As long as throttles are in place to prevent my system from being overloaded and taken down, and I have a good mechanism to clean up my comments, I won’t need or use registration, and hence wouldn’t need TypeKey on my site.

Besides, didn’t I say I wasn’t going to continue using Movable Type? So what’s my problem?

My problem is that TypeKey impacts on me outside my space. If other sites implement TypeKey, and I refuse to ‘register’ with some form of centralized authentication service, I can’t comment in their spaces. If other tools buy into the open API (information of which is only available after TypeKey is released), and incorporate TypeKey into their tools, then the number of sites I’ll be able to comment at, will shrink.

Not only will I, who you can assume is an ‘authenticate’ person, be restricted from joining open conversations on comment threads, but the flavor of comments will begin to change, and I can’t see this as a good thing. It seems to be popular behavior, now, to sneer with disdain at the misfits that clutter our comment spaces. Not surprisingly, another opinion I don’t share, and probably not shared by the majority of people who would like more responses to their writing, not less.

I’m writing a longish essay, which I hope to finish soon (yeah, yeah, so who’s the tease now?), on comments and communication and ‘proper’ behavior, and yes, even incorporating subjects as diverse as Howard Stern and AKMA’s signification and accountability. (Though I am not a philosopher, and usually find when I ruminate on AKMA’s more learned discussions that I’ve found a po’man’s interpretation of the subject matter, and have attached to the bright and shiny thread in the discussion rather than the more complex and hence richer aspects, most likely to the pained reading by one and all.)

In the writing one of the points I hope to make is that even negative statements have their place in communication. Yes, even a troll can serve a purpose, if by trolling they force people into defending what are deliberately provocative statements, weak assertions, and unfounded assumptions. We are in danger of filtering all passion from our interactions with each other. Why have comments if everything we say boils down to the safely, ‘Indeed’, and ‘Indeed not.”

Whether I use Movable Type or not, TypeKey impacts on me. So I continue to push about it. And to be frank, Six Apart does have an architecture in place for comment management in Movable Type 3.0, and I think they really need to provide a detailed look at this sooner, rather than later. Hints and teases, and promises of ‘more later’, are only going to make things worse, rather than better.

In the meantime, if you know of any other weblogs where any member of Six Apart has left comments, please drop me a note in comments, or send a trackback ping to this posting (you don’t have to link me to do this.)

(Morbus Iff has a good comment at his site about the implications of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks against TypeKey:

If TypeKey proves effective, it won’t be able to stand up to a DDOS attack (if Microsoft, Yahoo, and eBay can’t, what makes us think that Ben and Mena will?), and while it runs around figuring out router filtering rules (ha, ha, ha), blogs will be as susceptible as they were before (well, that really depends on MT: if TypeKey is down, will it deny or allow all comments?))

Again, and yes, this is speculation based on what Ben has said, to take it with a grain of salt: but my impression is that TypeKey is used when a person registers with a site, to authenticate that person’s access to comments. I get the impression that it’s not used for every comment, only for the registration process. If true, this would eliminate some of the technical problems – but leave a lot of social issues still unanswered.

But then there’s that ‘login once, comment everywhere’ statement. Gah!

Frankly, mentioning something like TypeKey without being ready to provide details was perhaps not one of Six Apart’s better ideas. Stay tuned for when more information is released.