- Currently Listening to:
- Depeche Mode — Policy of Truth
The web today is a-flutter with calls for new “standards” to fight back against the increasing problem of hostility in the world of blogging. This comes on the back of a spate of unpleasant, unprovoked attacks on various bloggers because of their politics or views on seemingly harmless topics.
Tim O’Reilly and Jimbo Wales have jointly put forward a proposal to tag websites with somewhat quaint badges, showing what level of discourse you can expect to see. This idea seems doomed to failure to me, despite the big names that are pushing it through. As they stand, the draft “Code of Conduct” has a number of problems. For example,
We do not allow anonymous comments.
We require commenters to supply a valid email address before they can post, though we allow commenters to identify themselves with an alias, rather than their real name.
Identity spoofing is ridiculously easy at the moment, so this recommendation just can’t work. At least until initiatives like “Identity 2.0” and OpenId take off.
On the badges, Jeff Jarvis writes:
[The blogosphere is not a medium.] It’s a place. And when I moved into the place that is my town, I didn’t put up a badge on my fence saying that I’d be a good neighbor (and thus anyone without that badge is, de facto, a bad neighbor). I didn’t have to pledge to act civilized. I just do.
Indeed. I posit that the big win here will come from improvements in policy enforcement, rather than up-front policy declaration. Everyone already knows they’re not supposed to act like a jackass.
The NYTimes article linked above notes
A subtext of both sets of rules is that bloggers are responsible for everything that appears on their own pages, including comments left by visitors. They say that bloggers should also have the right to delete such comments if they find them profane or abusive.
The problem here is that deleting moronic or venomous comments does nothing to stem the tide of trolling that a particular post is going to attract. It merely hides the problem under a rug for a short time, before someone, on finding their comment deleted, decides to write something even worse, perhaps in a place where the original poster doesn’t have such sweeping editorial control.
Online discussions are entropic, and it only takes one misinterpreted or snide comment to transform the complexion of a thread into a chaotic flamewar of no merit. Chaos begets chaos, and maintaining the quality and order of a discussion requires both time and vigilance.
A few years ago I saw an interesting approach by Sam Ruby, very nicely illustrated through an anecdote here by Mark Pilgrim. The theory:
In social sciences, there’s a theory called the “broken window” theory. It states that a little ongoing maintanence — like fixing windows as soon as they get broken — can have dramatic effects. It also states that the smallest sign of destruction, if left untended, tends to bring about more destruction. Even in a “good” neighborhood, where normally people wouldn’t dream of being randomly destructive.
This is powerful thinking, and the most effective way to deal with the problem that I have seen. Passages in comments are selectively marked as “flamebait” by the site’s owner, which then appear as text with a strike-through to anyone reading the comments. This allows a site owner to Bowdlerise a comment in line with their site’s own (stated or no) comments policy, and leaves a tangible signifier to anyone else thinking of commenting that there is a single voice patrolling the comments and keeping order.
Things could be so different now
It used to be so civilised.
I’ll be upgrading this blog to Wordpress 2.0 soon, since the list of what’s new looks so good, in particular the new Ajax-ified admin panel. Update: Done. Works well.
- The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss — Disclosure – The Full Monty
- Subtraction.com: The New Who Thing
The micro-blogging service Tumblr is among the most impressive startups I’ve seen rise in popularity over the past few years and yet when I look at it, I’m filled with ambivalence. On the one hand, it makes me mad as heck because I feel a sense of personal failure for not having thought of it. Its essential formula is so obvious as to be nearly banal: make the act of blogging absurdly simple. Not ‘make the act of blogging simpler,’ or even ‘much, much simpler,’ but rather ‘make the act of blogging as absurdly simple as it can possibly be made.’
My biggest complaint, by far, has bothered me for some time but has taken me only until recently to put my finger on. Tumblr discourages identity. Or, to be more specific, it promotes shallow identity.
- So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
It wasn't always an easy road, though. I learned many lessons the hard way, like how to handle irate netizens and how to extract the constructive bits out of painful criticism. I learned how much room for improvement there really is for me in the reading and writing department. I got schooled, publicly, by people smarter and more experienced. Those days were rough. There were tears. In my worst moments of self-doubt, I felt like I was in way over my head, that I was a fraud. I learned a whole lot about my strengths, and a whole lot more about my shortcomings. I was always comfortable pushing 1's and 0's around, but managing a staff of humans who were spread across the country was a huge challenge. (To all the bloggers, interns, and copy editors who have worked for me: thanks for putting up with my flailings.)
- Daring Fireball Linked List: Khoi Vinh on Tumblr and Identity
My biggest complaint, by far, has bothered me for some time but has taken me only until recently to put my finger on. Tumblr discourages identity. Or, to be more specific, it promotes shallow identity. Moreso than other blogging systems like WordPress or ExpressionEngine, Tumblr blogs frequently offer only scant few details about their authors. I can’t recall how many Tumblr sites I’ve visited where it wasn’t clear who was behind the posts, what their background was, or what their intent was.
- Live on the air – Fanny the Clown! « NiallOK.com
John Waters, who had previousy berated blogs and blogging on the station and put a challenge out that a blogger be brought in to studio to face him. As Damien informed us yesterday, it happened – Fergal Crehan of the tuppenceworth.ie blog took up the challenge and took Waters down a peg or two live on NewsTalk 106-108 this morning.
- Windbag Punctured - Bock The Robber
It seems he doesn’t like the idea of unqualified people writing. Now, I don’t know what John is qualified in, but he doesn’t strike me as a particularly well-read man, or a particularly gifted writer. I’ll lay you odds I know at least as much as he does on many things, and I can probably express myself at least as clearly as he does. For one thing, I don’t have the urge to quote a German philosopher every three lines, but that’s probably just a hangover from his student days when such pretentiousness might get a guy laid.
John, it seems, would like to have a licensing system in place before you’re allowed to express an opinion, and the new freedom provided by the internet offends him to his elitist, authoritarian core.
Somewhere along the way, he seems to have become a fossil, trapped in the past and terrified of a medium he doesn’t understand. This, in my view, is terribly sad for a fellow who used to write for Hot Press, a magazine that engaged in more than its fair share of iconoc
- The Coty Gonzales Interview
Generally speaking, I think the secret to getting a piece of content to go viral on the web is that it has to have one or more of the following characteristics. It has to 1. be super informative, 2. have the lust factor, or 3. be super funny or super shocking.
To give you examples, for CotyGonzales.com the Epic Lists provide some sort of shock value and can be quite lustful.
Think about it, imagine how many Apple fans wet their pants when they saw that 101 Apple themed tees existed on this planet. They went nuts because they wanted each and every one of these tees (lusting) and because they were shocked to see so many were available. Read through the comments and you’ll notice a bunch of Mac Heads mention that they want them all. Make sure your posts provide lust value.
- parislemon — On Pageview Pumping
Getting pageviews, when you work for a big enough site (as I do, at TechCrunch), is relatively easy. Like everything in life, there’s a game you can play. You could, for example, look at the hottest Google search terms and write stories based on those. At a popular site, since your Google PageRank is likely high enough, you’re going to rank very highly for some of those key search terms. There are no shortage of sites out there that play this game. And some play it well.
- Photo: But What About Our Motherfucking Uniques? - San Francisco Music - All Shook Down
A remarkably vituperative sign in front of Austin's Beerland Bar, captured during SXSW by Ustream's Eddie Codel. How much do you want to bet the sign's creator has still got debt from some fancy J-School?
- Alex Payne — On Hiatus
Lately, I’ve found the cathartic returns from blog-format writing to be diminishing. The ideas I’m trying to express never really get put to rest in my head when I write, now. Instead, they spark whole conversations that I never intended to start in the first place, conversations that leech precious time and energy while contributing precious little back. Negative responses I can slough off, but the sense that I’m not really crystalizing my unset thoughts by writing here is what bothers me.
- The Critical Mistake that Keeps Bloggers Broke | Copyblogger
Your blog is the face of your business, the voice of your brand, the bait that attracts a following.
And yes, you give away as much as you can with it, selflessly and abundantly.
But until you have a product or service to sell, and until the blog connects to that enterprise in a way that actually begins to generate actual revenue in addition to pumping up your online reputation and ego, your blog is nothing other than you expelling positive energy into the universe.
- The Redesign, Ctd - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan
Certainly at no point was I ever asked what I would like to see improved on this page. My requests over three years, often suggested by readers - for a continued-reading feature that does not require a new page (the new one sends you into a mass of prose where it's very hard to find where you left off), for a much more user-friendly search function, for one-click running summaries of long threads (torture, gay rights, Obama, health reform, Window views) etc, have all been turned down, even as just three people produce 300 posts a week to the point of exhaustion and generate between 55 and 60 percent of the Atlantic.com's entire traffic.
- My Blog, My Outboard Brain - O'Reilly Media
I consume, digest, and excrete information for a living. Whether I'm writing science fiction, editorials, columns, or tech books, whether I'm speaking from a podium or yammering down the phone at some poor reporter, my success depends on my ability to cite and connect disparate factoids at just the right moment.
As a committed infovore, I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy. I gather information from many sources: print, radio, television, conversation, the Web, RSS feeds, email, chance, and serendipity. I used to bookmark this stuff, but I just ended up with a million bookmarks that I never revisited and could never find anything in.
Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don't know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this -- it's one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables be
- The second post · phiffer.org
New York is understandably overwhelming to newcomers. I found the city to be thrilling when I first got here, but I completely understand this kind of negative reaction. More than most places it takes a lot of work to get by here. You have to have patience, humility and empathy for your fellow drones. You have to make time for friendships and hobbies to avoid falling into a work-only lifestyle. There are so many amazing things happening here, all at once, all the time, that most of my anxiety from living here comes from existing in a state of perpetual missed opportunities. I do what I can and try not to take the city too seriously.
- Why Tumblr is kicking Posterous’s ass « PEG on Tech
The answer is as easy as it is counter-intuitive: Tumblr is a New York company and Posterous is a Silicon Valley company.
Or, to put it another way: Posterous is an engineered product, while Tumblr is a designed product.
Posterous is extremely well engineered. There’s nothing wrong with it. Every single thing about it is well thought out. But it’s not just that it’s less pretty (though it is). It’s just not designed as well as Tumblr is.
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