Burningbird

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

It wouldn’t be fair of me to push both comments and trackback without mentioning the downside of both. Well, the downside of comments primarily.

It’s funny, but people think that comments are nothing more than a way for yay-sayers to stroke the weblogger, and this can be true with some weblogs, but not most. The stronger the weblogger’s writing, the stronger the comments. The more controversial the opinion, the more controversial the comments, usually. But if you write a certain way and say certain things then a bit of magic occurs and you can get some phenomenal debate within your comment threads. Some of the best writing at this weblog was from my readers.

However, comments are also a way for people to dump their passive-aggressive nastiness behind the cloak of anonymity. This happens occasionally in my comments, but not often. I’m lucky in that regard. Most people, regardless of what they say, leave their name and usually a web site link. Sometimes I’ll get an anonymous person, but that doesn’t mean they’re nasty — just that they prefer to be unknown.

But if the circumstances are right, comments can become your worst nightmare.

When I wrote Parable of the Languages and it was Slash Dotted, I knew my server was going to get hit, and it was. Over 100,000 unique visitors hit the server in a two-day period. Parable is still one of my most heavily hit posts, and I’ve lost track of where all it’s been linked. I do believe it has been linked now by every major college IT department in the world.

I also had close to 600 comments with Parable (300+ here plus additional 234 comments at Slashdot.com), the vast majority of which were complimentary, or downright hilarious. But there were some nasties.

I used to have HTML enabled for comments but Parable changed that when a person embedded HTML and a little custom CSS that basically disfigured the page. Made me realize how utterly dangerous it is to allow HTML, and I don’t care what kind of sanitation plug-in you use. End of HTML in my comments.

When that failed, a hacker — a real one — added C code to my comments that was a virus. An honest, genuine piece of code that would allow anyone to crack into a system and do damage. Why? I don’t know, it’s a Slash Dot thing.

Oh, don’t bother looking; I deleted the code.

Now, this weekend, wKen, who is running a monthly photo contest, was FARKed from fark.com. This is worse than being Slash Dotted, believe me. The reason he was FARKed is because some of the photos are nude studies of sensuous, beautiful women. And they are lovely photos and not deserving of the events that transpired. In fact, all of the photos submitted with the contest are excellent, because they’re all pictures representing each submitter’s love.

I didn’t see the comments that were left. I guess wKen’s server eventually crashed under the hits, but not before every juvenile idiot left what sounds like the worst form of demeaning weblogger graffitti.

wKen writes:

 

I was (and still am) trying to make a point about the increasing level of meaningless anger and hatred that I see on some web sites. It’s like an angry mob that seems to feel justified in not only stating their opinion, but damaging other people in the process. There are real people with real feelings in the photos on the wPhotoBlog, and the things that a group of idiots not only said but also did to ridicule and debase those innocent people is very sad.

 

I won’t get rid of comments — the good exceeds the bad by a wide margin. And I’m willing, as wKen is, to take the risk in order to foster communication and connectivity with my readers. To make this experience richer for us all.

But, oh, I wish sometimes there was enough AI in the world to detect when someone is being a passive-aggressive coward and writing nastiness into my comments. I could then catch the person in the act, while they are still linked to the IP address of their connection. Because, you see, I still have that little C code application that hacker wrote….

I received a trackback ping from Jonathon Delacour who writes about tracking and lies:

 

I have no idea—to be honest, I don’t really care—whether TrackBack will enable us to establish a more “truthful” web but it does seem to hold out the promise of allowing us to create more nuanced and inclusive relationships than a web based on links and PageRanks. Who knows? It might even reveal more of the very different thoughts that lie hidden, deep in our hearts.

 

I also received a trackback ping from David at SiteLog who calls trackbacks “remote comments”. He’s just recieved his first ‘remote comment’, attached to a posting he wrote titled, ironically, “Lies, lies, and more lies”:

 

There are many types of love and if you are not careful, you can tell many lies. For the love of money, you will tell the lie that it is ok to sacrifice anything to get it. For the love of sex, you may tell the lie that love is not important. For the love of country, you may tell the lie that war is good.

 

I followed David’s trackback ping to Whispering Words who wrote “Lies and war” and who said:

 

That, to my mind, is the greatest lie, the most terrible lie. When a whole nation justifies its actions by the tired mantra, “They made us do it. We’re the victims here.” In war, we’re all victims. One way or another. I have family members who fled Vietnam, who were carried away in crude, leaky boats to uncertain futures as refugees. All of them still have the scars of that time….

I wonder if there are enough people in the United States who realises how much, under George Bush, they are beginning to resemble Nazi Germany.

 

Which uncannily connected with an earlier conversation from the weekend, associated with my post, Mein America where I compare the Ad Council’s Freedom Campaign with the propaganda techniques used by Adolf Hitler. And this was trackback pinged by There is no Cat, who talks about an article that looks at the parallels between Nazi Germany and today, and who links…

Webs are best built with sticky strands.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I feel it it my bones: 2003 will be the Year of Linking Dangerously. It will be the year that we reject page ranks and popularity-based ‘s/he with the most links bubbles to the top of the heap’ skimmers.

It’s in the air. It’s viral. It’s contagious. Hold your breath or you’ll catch it.

Case in point: Joshua Allan writes elegantly and compellingly in defense of the Semantic Web in response to somewhat disparaging comments made by Mark Pilgrim and Dare Obasanjo. In his post, Joshua makes the point that the Semantic Web is about people, and about making people’s voices audible and indelible.

On audibility, Joshua writes:

 

Today I get most of my lies from whichever barbarians have clawed their way to the top of the local and national media outlets. But sometimes when I see an advertisement for an interesting new product, I want to be able to pick up my remote control and click on “connect me to five people who hate the product and ask them why”

 

On indelibility, Joshua continues:

 

The story of Babel is a metaphor for what later happened at Alexandria; a reminder that we all suffer when we lose our ability to pass lessons to future generations…

Again, the Internet has had a profound impact on our ability to preserve our collective memory, but we are still very fragile.

 

Joshua sees the Semantic Web as a way of storing our collective knowledge in a manner that is easily accessible, based on methods more effective than today’s crude raw scans of hypermarked text. He also sees that the so-called problem child of the Semantic Web, RDF/XML, is more of a “red-herring” to the discussion rather than an actual impediment. RDF/XML is really nothing more than the selected method used to record knowledge, chosen from among all possible methods. It’s a means to an end, not the end itself. He answers the argument about RDF/XML being too complicated by saying:

 

The primary serialization for RDF is XML. This really starts to hurt your brain when you realize that RDF and XML are almost the same thing. Too much meta and your mind can’t bootstrap.

 

Joshua also states that he agrees with the consensus that, overall, RDF is to complex for most renmin (“people”), something I, of course, <shamelessplug>hope to disprove with my book</shamelessplug>.

Joshua Allan’s post is extremely well written and well argued, and you should take time to read it in its entirety — whether you’re a techie or not. I not only agree completely with Joshua, I’ll take it farther by saying that the Semantic Web will never be built with today’s system of dumb links — links with no inherent meaning attached to them other than their numeric value. All links do is push a resource’s rank up, piling link after link like pieces of wood for a bon fire; except instead of using dead trees we’re using dead links.

Torch the piles! Reject the concept of “all we need is links, sweet links”! Burn down the house that Google built before we become as dependent on Google as we almost became on Microsoft Windows.

So where do you start?

First, enable Trackback. It’s the first semi-intelligent threading implementation that’s actually starting to get fairly widespread use.

The Trotts from Movable Type have provided standalone trackback servers for those who don’t use Movable Type. The technology has already been integrated into Bloxson. If you’re using a weblogging tool that hosts the pages, ask the tool vendor to incorporate trackback functionality if it hasn’t already.

Once your tool supports Trackback, use it. It’s there to allow people to visibly show their connection to your writing. It let’s your readers know that others have something to say about your post, good or bad. It continues the conversation. It breaks the hell out of this idea that weblogs are just some form of electronic journal, written in isolation that just happens to be published for posterity’s sake.

More than that, though, Trackbacks provide deliberation and some intelligence with the link. Not a whole lot other than the words of the associated post, but it’s a start. There’s a tiny bit of RDF/XML associated with the Trackback link — a placeholder for future information, future bits of knowledge. A base on which to build.

At a minimum, Trackback doesn’t break into your space like comments does. You don’t even have to post the excerpts associated with the trackback — just the link. By allowing trackbacks, you’re providing a way for others to participate in the thread you started. When you don’t implement trackback, you’re breaking the thread.

Of course, the use of Trackback, as well as enabling comments is a personal choice. If you wish to separate yourself from others and exist in splendid isolation, far be it from me to get in your face about it.

Next week, part two of Year of Linking Dangerously — getting rid of your blogrolls.

(Thanks to Kevin Marks for sending me the link to Joshua Allan’s wonderful post.)