Categories
Semantics

Semantic web enabler of the year

If there was a Semantic Web Enabler of the Year award, I would nominate the site rdfdata.org (and the creator, Bob DuCharme) daily, and twice on Sunday. Especially when you see data such as details of terrorist acts since 1988, organized in OWL. My jaw dropped when I looked through it. My, my, what the warbloggers wouldn’t give for query tools on this data store. And I wouldn’t know about it if it weren’t for rdfdata.org bringing all these disparate data stores together in one spot.

As I progress in my update on the chapters in the book, I plan on using this site to find data for new examples and demonstrations, primarily because it deserves all the recognition we can give it.

Categories
Social Media Specs

I broke Nofollow

I’m still trying to write something on Technorati Tags. What’s slowing me up is there’s been such a great deal of interesting writing on the topic that I keep wanting to add to what I write. And, well, the weather warmed up to the 60’s again today, and who am I to reject an excuse to go for a nice walk. Plus I also watched Japanese Story tonight, so there goes yet, even more, opportunity to write to this weblog.

Thin excuses for sloth and neglect aside, it is interesting that a formerly obscure and rarely used attribute in X(HTML), rel, has been featured in two major technology rollouts this week: Technorati Tags and the new Google “nofollow” approach to dealing with comment spam. Well, as long as they don’t bring back blink.

Speaking of the new spam buster, after much thought, I’ve decided not to add support for rel=”nofollow” to my weblogs. I agree with Phil and believe that, if anything, there’s going to be an increase of comment spam, as spammers look to make up whatever pagerank is lost from this effort. And they’re not going to be testing whether this is implemented — why should they?

But I am particularly disturbed by the conversations at Scoble’s weblog as regard to ‘withholding’ page rank. Here’s a man who for one reason or another has been linked to by many people, and now ranks highly because of it: in Google, Technorati, and other sites. I imagine that among those that link, there was many who disagree with him at one time or another, but they’re going to link anyway. Why? Because they’re not thinking of Google and ‘juice’ and the withholding or granting of page rank when they write their response. They’re focusing on what Scoble said and how they felt about it, and they’re providing the link and the writing to their readers so that they can form their own opinion. Probably the last thing they’re thinking on is the impact of the link of Scoble’s rank.

Phil hit it right on the head when he talked about nofollow’s impact, but not its impact on the spammers — the impact on us:

But, again, it’s not so much the effects I’m interested in as the effects on us. Will comments wither where the owner shows that he finds you no more trustworthy than a Texas Hold’em purveyor, or will they blossom again without the competition from spammers? Will we do the right thing, and try to find something to link to in a post by someone new who leaves a comment we deem not worthy of a real link, or will new bloggers find it that much harder to gain any traction?

That Phil, he always goes right to the heart within the technology–but blinking, lime green? That’s cruel.

No, no. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve spent too much time worrying about Google and pageranks and comment spammers. A few additions to my software, and comment spam hasn’t been much of a problem, not anymore. I spend less than a minute a day cleaning out the spam that’s collected in my moderated queue. It’s become routine, like clearing the lint out of the dryer after I finish drying my clothes.

Of course, if I, and others like me, don’t implement “nofollow” we are, in effect, breaking it. The only way for this to be effective as a spam prevention technique is if everyone uses the modification. I suppose that eventually we could fall into “nofollow” and “no-nofollow” camps, with those of us in the latter added to the new white lists, and every link to our weblogs annotated with “nofollow”, as a form of community pressure.

Maybe obscurity isn’t such a bad thing, though; look what all that page rank power does to people. But I do feel bad for those of you who looked to this as a solution to comment spam. What can I say but…

Categories
Burningbird Weblogging

This is a disclaimer

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

This is the only disclaimer I will issue from this site. It reads:

I will never issue a disclaimer at this site. Again.

The discussion rages around us about how we’re in danger of losing our credibility, or our ethics are in question. However a more serious issue is at stake: we are in danger of becoming bores.

Somewhere, somehow, along the way we began to take ourselves seriously, and now it’s difficult to read original writing that doesn’t have a caveat or a disclaimer attached. Multiple weblogs have popped up with people appearing out of nowhere, demanding that we all conform to a certain set of beliefs and practices, and the rest of us, who at one point in time used to have fun nod our heads and say “Yesir” or “Yesmam”, because no matter what, we want to be seen as ‘credible’.

What is it that we’ve been doing the last several years but establishing the authenticity of our voices? What more credibility do we need than that?

I used to frown at sites where the webloggers would use pseudonyms, not the least because I have a god-awful time spelling that word. Actually, it was because I thought that if our words meant anything, we would attach our name to them.

What I’ve found as I’ve grown up from babe to toddler to fresh young thing, to old and tired woman in these very pages, is that names don’t matter, because it is the words themselves that have to stand out naked in the light. It is our writing by which you know us, or don’t. At this point in time, either you know me or your don’t; you trust me or you don’t, and no disclaimer is going to make my voice more authenticate, or real to you.

I also used to mouth about this standard and that: one shouldn’t delete or edit a writing once posted; or one should note when there is a possible conflict of interest; or, in the case of something like Marqui, one shouldn’t write about a product in our space unless one has an interest in same.

What a pompous prick I was.

Frankly, if another opportunity comes along like Marqui (but not Marqui, itself) I plan on taking it. Why? Because it allows me more dignity than to have to pass the hat, an act that nibbles away at my confidence. And I will most likely write once about how I’m being paid by the company, but I’m not going to circle the entries in red ink and paste on “I’m getting bloody paid for this”, with each entry. Neither will I write anything I wouldn’t normally write, but you’re going to have to take my word for it, because I’m not going to post a notarized notice on my site that I Am Not Lying for Bucks. In fact, you might as well assume that everything I will write is a lie, but it will be an authenticate lie, because I will never write anything that I don’t want to genuinely say.

So if a company wants to pay me for upping their Google rank,rather than sneak it in through my comments, I will. And I’ll do so in my own immutable way, which will probably frighten away all of the right-thinking companies anyway, leaving me the interesting ones, and we’ll proceed to possibly have some fun. Because if I don’t promise not to lie, I do promise to do my best not to bore you, but no guarantees: what I may find interesting may not interest you.

(You don’t like my gnomes?)

I was asked in my post, The Other Shoe on Nofollow, the following:

Really now. Do you have a citation for this conversation with Dave Winer or did you just make it up?

I answered:

I make everything up at this site.

I’m really a haberdasher in New Jersey. My name is Stan, and I’m bald, 85, thin as hunger, sad as regret, but with big black eyes that once twinkled wickedly at saucy ladies who would show too much ankle.

Oh, and I walk with a limp, every other Sunday.

That is my disclaimer: *I make everything up on this site. It will then be up to you to read me, or not; to believe me, or not. You will have to make your own judgment whether to regard what I say about the Google nofollow attribute, or Jeff Jarvis, or the Harvard Conference of the Week, or especially, the existence of Missouri mountain gnomes. Basically, you’ll have to read what I read, and then read what others read, and you’ll have to form your opinion and act accordingly, because I’m not going to do it for you through the use of a bloody disclaimer! Sorry, there is no ‘get out of thinking’ free card at my site.

(By the way, I lie, but I do not lie about gnomes.)

I read something in Rebecca Blood’s weblog that brought me up short this morning and made realize how far we have fallen in our effort to be polite and proper and credible and ethical.

I’ve noticed a slight problem with the Technorati tagging system. For every tag, Technorati is pulling an indentically tagged photograph from photo-sharing site Flickr. Unfortunately, for a few hours this morning the most recent tagged photo under MLK was a picture of a protester’s sign that read “Setting aside our differences to focus on our common goals: peace, love, harmony, killing Jews, and tolerance.” Nice. [more…]

Now, that photo is perfectly appropriate on Flickr as part of an individual’s collection, and as documentation of Sunday’s rally. It’s perfectly appropriate as an illustration for ‘protests’, or even ‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’, even though it surely will offend some people wherever it appears. But it is not appropriate to illustrate a category tagged ‘MLK’. I personally was offended–these sentiments reflect the polar opposite to those espoused by Dr. King. More to the point, such an illustration is inappropriate–that poster has as much to do with Dr. King as would a picture of a banana peel.

I called Technorati to register a protest, but was informed that Technorati had no mechanism available for removing the photo other than turning off the entire Flickr feed. Worse, I was met with polite protestations that Technorati is not in the business of editing the Web, just delivering it. I was also given some vague heebee-jeebee about “community standards” and how “the community would decide”.

Well, I’m here to tell you that community standards vary wildly, and in the case of an aggregator mean nothing at all. An aggregator like Technorati only provides a succession of individual posts, it doesn’t summarize or codify the content it serves. Furthermore, “community standards” do not, indeed, can not defend against abuse of the system–only design can do that.

I will write more on Technorati Tags later, because they have very serious consequences to semantic web development, but for now, I read Rebecca’s reference to ‘appropriate’ images and enforcing ‘community standards’ and I wanted to put my head down and cry. What is sadder is that Rebecca has enough power within this community, and hence Technorati, to possibly force her opinion of what is ‘proper’ through, and that scares the bejeesus out of me.

If this is what you want from a ‘credible’ weblog, or an ‘ethical’ one, than I can guarantee you now: I will never be credible, I will never be ethical, and I sure as hell will never be appropriate. And you may stick your ‘community standards’ where the sun don’t shine in my mountain gnome’s gnarly little ass.

*I even stole that phrase from Dave Rogers, who I think is telling us that what’s real is shared spit and cat babysitting. But I have seen a gnome, Dave.

Categories
Specs Weblogging

The other shoe on nofollow

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I expected this reason to use nofollow would take a few weeks at least, but not the first day. Scoble is happy about the other reason for nofollow: being able to link to something in your writing and not give ‘google juice’ to the linked.

Now, he says, I can link to something I dislike and use the power of my link in order to punish the linked, but it won’t push them into a higher search result status.

Dave Winer started this, in a way. He would give sly hints about what people have said and done, leaving you knowing that an interesting conversation was going on elsewhere, but you’re only hearing one side of it. When you’d ask him for a link so you could see other viewpoints, he would reply that “…he didn’t want to give the other party Google juice.” Now I imagine that *he’ll link with impunity–other than the fact that Technorati and Blogdex still follow the links. For now, of course. I imagine within a week, Technorati will stop counting links with nofollow implemented. Blogdex will soon follow, I’m sure.

Is this so bad? In a way, yes it is. It’s an abuse of the purpose of the tag, which was agreed on to discourage comment spammers. More than that, though, it’s an abuse of the the core nature of this environment, where our criticism of another party, such as a weblogger, came with the price of a link. Now, even that price is gone.

*or not

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.