A Whole Lotta Nothing

Does Amazon enable comment spam?

Comment spam has been around for many years now and I've seen all the tricks of the trade blasted at me and my sites. Lately, it's gotten tougher and tougher to weed out every last bit of spam because it's clear comment spammers are hiring people to write somewhat on-topic comments and then loading either their username or the comment with links to their sites (which are loaded with ads).

Here's an example of what I'd call a high quality comment spam:

It's on topic, it seems like an innocuous pat on the back in broken english, but the username links to a video game fan site. The comment was posted to get a backlink to their site. Sometimes they copy and paste two sentences from my own post as a new comment, but usually it's a mellow "this is a good post" comment meant to fall under my radar and eventually improve their Google ranking for whatever keyword they are chasing.

I started thinking about how people are farming out this "make an innocuous comment and link back to my site" work and I was reminded of Amazon's Mechanical Turk system where you pay humans to perform piecemeal work, often for mere pennies. A couple years ago, ReadWriteWeb noticed somewhat spammy activity on the Turk system so I decided to run the same searches today and found similar results.

• 29 results for "bookmark" including people asking for comments on their site and posting their site to every social bookmark system, some paying as little as a penny per job.
• 42 results for "comment" including lots of rate and comment my youtube videos up, test our comment system, and flat out "leave a good comment on my site" jobs.
• 18 results for "digg" including people asking digg votes as well as posting their site to digg for them.
• 13 results for "write a paragraph" These frequently become posts on adsense-loaded sites and other SEO nonsense.

I'm sure there are bigger sites that enable these kind of bottom-feeder transactions on the web. I bet there are whole black hat SEO forums and marketplaces to buy links, comments, and articles, but it's kind of a shame that two years after ReadWriteWeb pointed out the problems they still persist. I love using Amazon as a customer and I think the Mechanical Turk system is pretty cool, I just wish they did a better job eradicating this kind of thing that leads me to have to judge all my incoming comments harshly as defaulting to spam unless they seem like honest additions to the conversation.

I'll miss you, Brad

"I try to be my own hero. That may sound flippant, but 15 years ago when I was really trying to grasp a direction for my life, a friend wise beyond his years reminded me that no one is perfect, that heroes fall and white knights on horseback are rare. Instead, he said, I should identify those qualities I found heroic and good and valuable in anyone I admired, and cultivate them in myself. "You won't always succeed," he said, "but you'll be better for trying. Losers sit and wish. Heroes try. Be your own hero."

It ends up, though, that most of the admirable qualities I want to have I saw in my father. He was the smartest man I've ever known and understood better than most the difference between education (of which he had little) and knowledge (of which he had much). He was incredibly gregarious, could always find something to talk about -- at length -- with absolutely anyone and in conversation with him, you always felt as though you were the absolute center of his universe right then. Dad had a story about everyone, and I never met anyone who knew him who didn't have five or ten about him.

There's a quote by Mark Twain, something along the lines of "You should endeavor to live your life such that when you die, even the undertaker will be sorry." The procession of cars at my dad's funeral stretched out four miles and, yes, the usually stoic funeral director cried. I should be so lucky. "

-Brad Graham, May 2001

Via Neale's interview with him. RIP Brad.

Going, going, gone

This should be exciting: Around 2PM today (Pacific) the PVRblog auction will close.

Dear PR people: How to Pitch Bloggers

In the wake of my previous post and Gina's PR blacklist that sprang from it, it seems like a good chunk of the PR industry is blogging about the things they should and shouldn't be doing, but I'm not seeing a lot of practical real-world solutions that would work for bloggers getting pitched. All the advice has come from the PR side of things so it's all about how they train employees, how they do their work, and why their work is vital to bloggers (newsflash: it often isn't).

So in the spirit of extending an olive branch to the PR industry, here are some very basic tips I haven't seen anyone mention elsewhere:

1. Don't ever send a press release to a blogger based on a purchased list
I keep hearing about this thing called the Bacon/Cision list and how all the bloggers complaining about getting spammed are on it (the idea of someone selling a list with my email on it is another matter). As many PR people have stated, connecting PR and bloggers should be a connection made via reading their blog and contacting them with a personal note at the very least. Adding 200 names to a bcc: list on an emailed press release because you got 200 blogger emails from some list is the absolutely wrong way to go about it. Don't ever do this.

2. Go beyond the press release
The rare, few times I've felt like enduring all this PR hassle was worth it was when someone from a company contacted me with an invite to preview a product, try out a site, and/or obtain a review item. A press release is the thing I line the bird cage with, a review unit is something I can actually use for a week or two and get a full review story written ready to publish on the day your client launches the product. I can't stress it enough that a press release sent to me is just plain noise and totally and completely useless. Or if you must, at least just send me a link to one in case I want to learn more about the news you are sharing instead of pasting 2,000 words in ALL CAPS into an email.

3. Introduce a feedback loop!
I've never been contacted by anyone in PR that bothered to follow-up with me at any point in our "relationship". I just get a bunch of press releases emailed to me again and again, often by the same people. If you've hand-picked out some bloggers covering topics you have clients releasing news about, at least check with the bloggers after a month, or your second message, or some other regular interval. Ask them if the PR they've been receiving is helpful and if it should be tweaked, or even ended if it's not useful.

4. Provide an unsubscribe link
This is totally bottom-of-the-barrel, least-you-can-do-to-appease-bloggers stuff here, but at the very least provide an instant, no-humans-required way for a blogger to remove themselves from contact they aren't getting anything but frustration from. About 1/4 of the PR email I get is managed with some sort of list interface and provides this option, and I use the option when off-topic, all-caps press releases get blasted my way. I prefer a no-humans-required option because I've asked people at an agency to remove me and they said they had and sorry for the inconvenience, only to be emailed by the same person two weeks later.

5. Use metrics to help you do your PR job
If personally emailing a bunch of bloggers with personal messages sounds like a lot of work that doesn't scale, try using metrics to help you figure out what works and doesn't. Right now we have the annual "did my PR firm show up on a blacklist?" metric, but if you implement the suggestions above, keep tabs on what percentage of receivers clicked on a link to read a press release (are your press releases effectively written?), figure out what % click on an unsubscribe link (how effective are you targeting bloggers), figure out how often the bloggers you contact ever write about your clients (how effective your PR/blogger strategy is) and when they do was it because of a press release or did you give them something more (to figure out if newer non-traditional approaches are working better).

update: Just to be clear here, I'm not asking for bloggers to be treated differently than journalists in other media because we bloggers are a cranky lot that can harm your company with a snide blog post if you do things wrong -- my point in treating bloggers differently is that bloggers can often publish perfectly informative, up-to-date blogs without PR, instead relying on RSS, other blogs, Google News, and link aggregators to find news about topics they are interested in.

I published multiple blogs for five years before I got my first unsolicited press release, and if PR people want to stay relevant, they need to acknowledge that bloggers work in an information-rich environment filled with millions of choices and as a PR person you really need to be adding some value to their approach instead of taking time away with off-topic press releases emailed to them.

Stop asking, start filtering

I know it's a cliché as a blogger to complain about public relations flacks sending you giant PDFs and weekly emails on topics you don't care about, but recently I noticed my tried and true polite email saying:

Please remove my email address from your PR lists.

Thanks,
Matt

totally stopped working. Turns out that a lot of these PR companies have a single database of random blogger emails they've snarfed up, but each employee seems to maintain their own personal list. When I ask Alice at example.com PR to remove me, I noticed a week later I got another PR blast from Bob at example.com PR. Then Steve at example.com PR hits me again a day later.

So for now, I'm moving to filters in Gmail. The entire PR agency domain goes into the From: and you set it to delete immediately. Instantly, no more PR spam from Alice, Bob, or Steve, forever, and I don't have to ask to opt-out of something I never opted into.

And to people working in PR, some bloggers do seem to post the things you send, but in four years of daily PR email blasts that now number in the thousands, I recall one or two being something I was actually interested in. That's about the same success ratio of general email spam over the past 10 years for me.

update: I was thinking of posting my own blacklist of annoying firms, but it looks like Gina from Lifehacker beat me to the punch.

And to PR folks reading this post, I left a comment describing my dream scenario for how PR people should interact with bloggers:

the perfect PR person would match me up with topics I write about and when they figure out a perfect product pitch I might be interested in, email me personally once to share it, and ask me for confirmation if I’d like to get future email from them. Unless I reply back with a "yes" don't add me to a list or pitch me again -- it's a not a good match and is only going to build frustration on my end if you keep sending unsolicited pitches.

Another update: I've written some tips on How To Pitch PR to Bloggers

Testing upgrade

Just testing out to see what broke in moving to WP 2.5...

update: amazingly enough, nothing broke, even a bunch of old plugins I still use.

Bottom line, all weblog apps suck in some way

I spent most of the weekend elbow-deep in weblog archives and templates, trying to update my site to MT 4.01 and WP 2.3.2 (the former required the latter to export/import). After several hours, I started looking at Expression Engine and Tumblr and even considered Blogger to run this site. After getting fed up with shortcomings, I thought I'd describe my dream weblog engine instead.

For anyone that designs and builds a blog app or CMS, consider the following as typical use cases and design technology around these experiences. As a user, it feels like blog app design is instead about picking technology first and asking users to design their usage around that.

Admin Backend

When you're working on a blog post or setting up a blog, the backend of the application should be as close to the database as possible. A blog backend is almost by definition very low-traffic (especially with a single author) and there should be no impediments between having a thought and pushing a publish button. Most every app I've used is too slow in this regard, so even if you have to use another technology or application design from your blog publishing core functions, keep the backend as fast as possible.

Here's a design goal: writing a sentence, pressing publish, and seeing it live on the site should take a handful of seconds. Writers should never have to stare at a spinning graphic for a minute as they wait for the publishing engine.

Templates

Here's how most designers interact with templates: They work on a layout for a day or two (in photoshop and/or plain HTML/CSS), implement in whatever blog code the system requires, then they tweak it 100s of times over a few hours until it is done. Then it stays the same for anywhere from three to twelve months until a new theme/design inspiration comes along.

I personally like tweaking templates in a text editor, directly interacting with files on the server (as opposed to within a web app window, having to regenerate to see changes). I also prefer not to see the guts and/or technology of the blog CMS. Abstract it with output tags that don't require knowledge of programming languages. Keep application logic out of the layout whenever possible, and allow minor tweaks in simplified tools (clicking options in a widget editor) instead of requiring template changes.

Simplicity is golden. The fewer templates, the better. Blogger wins in this regard by allowing an entire site to be laid out with a single template file and some CSS. MT4 is kind of a nightmare in this regard with seemingly dozens of templates, sub-templates, and sub-sub-templates that can be tweaked.

My ideal template engine would be as simple as possible and allow me one general template to control layout, maybe a few specific templates for specialized output (an entry with comments is different than a list of archived posts), and allow for fast tweaks until the design is done. When a template is "done" convert it into some stable package the CMS can use and that I can share with others easily as an archive.

Import/Export

There really should be a standard of some sort that blog CMS companies can agree on for export and import. Users of blog engines shouldn't be hostages to their applications. Data exit and entry is problematic in everything I've used and it's a shame. Blogging is supposed to be fun and I prefer to be agnostic about what tools I'm using, so it'd be nice if I could change blog engines every three months without too much friction. I won't even go into how every engine has its own URL scheme -- it'd be nice if I could keep my permalinks forever, even as I change blogging apps.

Documentation

Every blog engine seems to suffer not only from poor documentation, but also extensions, template designs, and tutorials are almost always spread out across multiple sites (often out-of-date). If I download a blog CMS from Site A, plugins for it are on Site B, but they link to Site C where you can download things (but documentation for the plugin is back on Site B). Every blog engine seems to also have internal battles between "here are the free tools for your blog" and "here are our professional services for your blog" that leaves me wondering where to find more info or extensions after I download. Then there are random people that just setup galleries of plugins and templates that often rival or surpass the blog engine company's version of the same. It'd be nice if there was a way to find those as well.

My ideal blog engine company would hire some seasoned blogger and technical writer to be a documentation czar, keeping docs up to date when new versions are launched, produce screencasts for introductory users, and provide complete documentation at a stable URL that applies to every version of the product. If an outside site does a better job of collecting and offering templates, a documentation leader should recognize that and link to them in highly visible places. There doesn't seem to be anyone internal at these companies fighting for the users to make sure they can keep being informed about how to best use the product.

Server Load

I'll admit I like simple, live code editing of my template files (as described above) when I'm tweaking a design, and I love fast admin screens that let me post instantly, but once a post is up, it's just text on a web server and should exist as a flat file. I've clicked through way too many digg links and del.icio.us popular links only to end up at database connection errors or too many user errors on servers that can't handle the load. I know building a perfect cache is hard to do, but failure of your site at the most visible and important time for you should never happen.

Anyone got any other ideas of how to build the perfect blog application?

Trying something new

I've been meaning to redesign this site for a while, to set aside more screen space for writing, both to make it easier to read longer pieces for readers but also to help me focus more on just plain old writing instead of all the other junk I used to keep here. As I sat down to think about how I could wipe out what I had and start over again visually, I kept coming back to all the cool Wordpress themes I've seen lately, including the one you see powering this site.

Now, I would consider Ben and Mena Trott to be pretty close friends and I've helped write a book on Movable Type tweaking. I still use it for several other sites and don't plan on changing, but when it comes to personal websites, I've always wished for a simple way to share MT templates either through actual files or the API. I've requested it from SixApart for the past 3+ years and in the meantime, Wordpress came along with Themes and eventually every good web designer that wanted to see their work shared with millions flocked to it and started offering up downloadable Themes.

A few months ago when I was praising Vox I said I never wanted to work on another blog template file again and I was serious about that. Wordpress has a great theme system and while I think editing php templates is an even worse idea than custom Blogger/MT tag templates, I don't have to thanks to the thousands of free theme packs available online. I was somewhat reluctant to jump to Wordpress until I saw some 2.0 screenshots and heard good things from longtime MT-using friends. The last time I used WP, I had a lot of problems with the admin editing backend. I noticed a few things have been fixed but a lot of things still got stuck.

Here's a list of hang-ups I found when converting over. Some might read these and feel it's nitpicking or criticism, but I consider these bug reports:

• When searching google for info on importing a MT blog, I ended up at codex.wordpress.com with some instructions I followed only to find out the entire system has changed with the latest release. Since the docs are on the wordpress.com server, they should be updated to say "the following is for the 1.x version of Wordpress, go here to see Importing tips for Wordpress 2.x" or something like that. Adobe/Macromedia is great about this -- anytime I hit an old Coldfusion docs page I see a pointer to the latest version of that page for the latest release.


• I had to split my exported MT blog since PHP had a 1Mb upload limit on my server. That's a drag (I had to ask a friend how to do that) and I wish it used the API instead.


• To activate Akismet, it said I just needed an account (not a blog) at Wordpress.com to get an API key, but I couldn't get an API key unless I got a blog, which seems like a waste (and possibly a way to artificially inflate the subscription numbers at Wordpress.com or something).


• Plugins are activated in the Plugins area, but not set up there. Why? It makes no sense to me to activate something on one page, but have to jump to a submenu buried in the Options area to change settings on it. Why isn't there a Plugin Options submenu in Plugins? And why instead is there a way to tweak the actual PHP of the Plugins? Does any normal user really need that? Oh, it looks like Akismet is configured in the Plugins area, but nothing else I've added is.


• Where can I turn off comments by default on new posts? I don't see it anywhere in the Options area (I found it under Discussion options, which I guess is more specific (though I would think putting in the Writing options would make more sense) though the checkbox describing it sounds confusing to me "Allow people to post comments on the article" when really I want a "comments enabled/disabled by default". Fixed.


• I don't see anywhere to turn off or on Pings/Trackbacks system-wide or set defaults for it. Fixed.


• The feedburner plugin I installed doesn't auto-forward requests to Feedburner. I don't think it works well with a pre-existing Feedburner feed. I'm going to have to edit my .htaccess or templates to do it. Fixed: it worked five minutes later.


• Some custom styles (simple floats and margins) I applied to images in previous imported posts appear to be stripped on import. Dunno if that's MT or WP's doing.


• After I publish a post, I get sent to a blank Write New post page. Why not jump me to the edit page on the thing I just posted? Also, I see that the Manage page still has the Edit screen linked on one teeny tiny link marked Edit. The "View" link made me think that would allow me to view the post in the Manage interface, but instead pops me out to the live post on my blog. Why not link the full title of the post to the editing interface? Why else would I be in the Manage section unless I wanted to edit/delete my posts?


• Why isn't the Categories widget expanded by default? Why do I have to tweak that every time I make a post? Why is "Uncategorized" an actual category?


• In the wysiwyg interface, when you go to add a link, the popup has two buttons at the bottom, one to insert the link and the other to cancel. The Cancel button is on the lower right, where all the save buttons are located in Wordpress, but you have to click the one on the left instead to actually save it. Intuitively, I almost hit cancel every time.


• Widgets are kind of a mess. I had to download it and activate it like a plugin, then go to Presentation to edit (another weird plugin on one page, options on another). There's no Flickr widget by default even though the first Google results for flickr widget say it is included. My other results ended up with 404s on download sites. There doesn't seem to be a user-friendly widget gallery, as the plugin itself dumps me into some programmer widget trunk page which makes no sense.


• My Archives page is a 404, and I have no idea where to find the actual page. Fixed.


• The wysiwyg interface rewrites any custom CSS I try and add to an inline image. This is broken and needs to be fixed.

Top 10 Reasons Why Your 5 Tips About 7 Cutting-Edge Technologies will annoy me

Seriously, the top of digg, delicious, reddit, and every other link aggregator seems to be clogged with Lists of Vital Things You Should Know.

After seeing dozens of them fly by every single day, I'm starting to think it's just lazy headline writing that gets promoted up thanks to our nanosecond attention-span RSS readin' latte drinkin' ruby on rails codin' getting things done task managin' nerd culture.

Cool it with the lists. Feel free to use real paragraphs and explain stuff. I have time.

Vox Love

From an interview with Jason Kottke:

When I first started putting my thoughts online in the mid-90s, there was little about my life that I wouldn’t put online, but now it’s almost the opposite situation.

What he said.

A year or two ago I realized I didn't really feel like sharing everything going on with my life anymore. It's got its upsides, but the drawbacks are many. Not to mention all the people that said too much about something or someone and later had it bite them in the ass.

After a few months of not blogging every little thing on my mind I realized I was missing something by no longer doing it -- writing about your thoughts and life's little triumphs and tragedies helped me work through my thoughts or understand the problems better. So I started blogging privately at LiveJournal and a dozen or so friends also did and I got a lot out of it. But LiveJournal has its limitations and all the little things I disliked about it eventually turned me off from frequent posting there. It's a pain to login all the time. A pain to add friends. It used to be a pain finding the "write a new post" link anywhere on the site.

Vox came out and I've been playing with it for a couple months and enjoying it immensely. It's still pretty streamlined and straightforward but it's got the UI that never gets in my way (unlike LiveJournal's UI). The friends and family blogging is the key feature and I've read a lot from people that don't understand what all the hoopla is about.

It's kind of like TiVo in that you have to try it out first, live with it a month or two before you realize it's the greatest thing ever. Or think of it as an iceberg -- it seems simple and not very useful at first but my god is that one little feature hiding a great deal of utility. I'm blogging at Vox now and a couple dozen people I see in real life and hang out with several times a year are also on it and on my friends list. If I want to ask them something or share an intensely personal tidbit, I can post it there for them and I don't have to IM or call anyone and I don't have to tell the same story 15 times as I see them throughout the year. And I don't have to read about how I'm the biggest dumbass on earth on another blog as a result of the post. Don't get me wrong -- I have skin as thick as leather but after seven years of this, it gets old when someone that doesn't understand you or your tone misinterprets something you've said. Blogging to friends means never having to explain the joke.

I kind of wish the functionality was built into my existing MT install I'm blogging with right now, but I'm ok with having a half public/private life on my vox site. I'm also a fan of the non-technical approach at Vox. If I never have to edit another blog template by hand again, I'll die a happy man. Same goes for tweaking inline styles in a HTML view. Vox is great for writing and not having to worry about template tag attribute documentation or having to add a style="text-align:center;" to an image ever again.

It's funny how things come full circle -- when I started out I hand coded blog entries, then I wrote my own CMS, then eventually I moved to a commercial CMS package and now I would prefer to never have to maintain a server or backups and I don't really feel like designing my own blog templates anymore.

I just want to write and not have to worry about all that other junk. And I'd rather keep the personal stuff to a few close friends. Vox is perfect for both of those things.

Buzzplant: none more crass

Lately I've been getting a steady stream of unsolicited bad marketing and PR mail. People promoting products are stooping to new lows in order to try and get legitimate weblogs to promote their clients for them. It's fake viral buzz hidden behind whatever legitimacy a participating website can offer. I've seen the quality and cluefullness of these PR pitches go way down, but tonight, one PR agency's pitch trumps them all.

I give you the flight 93 PR blast.

Now if you haven't heard, there's a movie about the hijacked plane on 9/11 that crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside, enroute to the Capitol. Personally, I have a hard time reliving that day and I can't even watch the trailer. I don't know how anyone can watch a film like that or how anyone can have any respect for a movie studio trying to make a buck off this nation's tragedy five years ago.

So their PR agency is giving away free tickets if you plaster banner ads on your blog to promote a movie reliving our terror so Universal Studios can make more money from ticket sales. What kills me is the line about:

Due to the nature of the subject matter of the film, we request that the giveaways be done in a very respectful, thoughtful manner.

...sort of like how this unsolicited PR pitch was sent to me oh so respectfully (I can even unsubscribe from future pitches! thanks!).

Bloggers will also love their idea to exploit your readers into writing some of that highly prized User Generated Content about that emotional day:

One idea is to ask visitors to your site to share their own memories of 9/11

...again, so a movie studio can make more money from this exploitation flick.

I hope the folks at buzzplanet do a great job getting more tickets sold for flight 93 and I can't wait to see flight 93 banners all over the blogosphere. I hope it makes Universal Studios a lot of money in the process, because there is no better way to come to terms with terror than to go watch a movie about it.

Lifehacking this week

I should have mentioned earlier that I'm helping edit Lifehacker this week, as a favor to Gina and Keith.

The last time I did it, I went a bit nuts writing a ton. For some reason I was motivated to get as many big posts in as possible. This time around, I'm busy with a thousand other things but I'm spending every available moment scouring the web for interesting things to mention and I'm also working on a long how-to about a web app I'm really excited about. So check it out this week, it'll be me expending about double the effort I waste here on any given day.

Pave the Planet

I'm impressed with Google Earth. I hadn't totally got what was cool about it until I built my first Google Earth app earlier today. The documentation is pretty slight (it'd be nice if they simply broke down which elements are required and which ones are optional) but they have a good demo file you can simply copy.

After about an hour of hacking and I had a nice kml file with nearly 4200 points on it, direct from the MetaFilter user database. It's great that Google Earth launched the client with this robust API already in place.

The results are pretty cool. I've only offered lat/long values for a week or two, and already there are loads of people in far off places showing up. It's a good feeling to give the old globe a spin and see points all around, and to hear stories of people getting to know each other offline as a result.

Most Improved, 2005

This is a long time coming, but I've really been enjoying Jalopnik the past few months. When Jalopnik and Autoblog and others like it launched, I was disappointed that these new car blogs were so boring. Cars are one of the most universal of hobbies, and you'd think it's easy to find someone nuts about it that could write. And yet, the first year of car blogs was a blur of warmed over press releases from Detroit and Japan. Yaawwwwwn.

At some point this year, Nick Denton roped in a superfreak car geek that sounds like he wrote for magazines or covered cars for a newspaper or something. His enthusiasm is infectious and his knowledge deep -- he loses me sometimes but for the most part it's still accessible for the average fan of cars. Me, I'm mostly into new car design and custom tuner cars, and the site doesn't disappoint these days. I'd go so far as to say it's the most dramatic turnaround I've seen in a blog, as it went from boring to must-read almost overnight by simply getting a new writer.

Slightly related -- the one thing I thought was annoying about the new author is the fixation on posting a silly car video of the day. They're usually a 30 second shaky short of some mulleted dork (the author calls them "hoons") trying to do a burnout. Sometimes they're funny. More often they're kind of boring. But sometimes they're incredible. I've come around on the "hoon" posts there too.

And while this is the intellectual equivalent of "Man Getting Hit By Football (in the nuts)", Redneck Surfing just might be the greatest hoon video ever uploaded. Watch it about twenty times like I did today to understand what I'm going on about. It's an instant classic.

The zeitgeist

12/10/2005 - Saturday Night Live does a joke commercial on the complexity of the Medicare prescription drug plan, and the joke includes a bit about RSS feeds and podcasts.

12/12/2005 - Arrested Development episode has a joke where the twin brother Oscar is told he can't update "but i'm oscar dot com" and he replies with something like "ok, I was thinking of trying a podcast."

It still surprises me when I hear "blog" on TV without a definition attached. "Podcast" being used in jokes on mainstream shows kind of blows my mind.

The revolution will be ajaxified

I was delightfully surprised when I visited Blogger today without a cookie and saw a new ajaxy recently updated scroller on the front page. Here's a 1.2Mb AVI file of it in action.

Just to reiterate a point I made early this year, there was a version of the blogger.com homepage that did exactly this, in early 2001, so I was extra pleased to finally see something like it in public today. I've replayed 2001 in my mind over and over again, wondering what the web developer world would be like today if KnowNow's stuff was unleashed on the blogosphere back then.

Putting the fun back in fundraiser

When you run a large community, you invariably get some members rising to the top in terms of participation and reaction from others. It's a natural part of any community and as fast as you can dream up ways to temper their contributions or wait for them to leave out of boredom, someone quickly fills their place and the cycle starts again. Eventually their personalities grow large and everywhere they move in a community they are treated with equal parts love and hate from the rest of the group.

Over the past few months, a couple members have kind of been in the spotlight due to their strong viewpoints and strong ways of expressing it and today Jessamyn had a brilliant idea.

"You should do a fundraiser. 'how much would you pay for a week without user x/user y'"

Then it hit me that yeah, it would be pretty easy to do thanks to dropcash and the money could go to a non-profit charity, like Creative Commons. I emailed two members that seem to polarize the community and much to their credit they were both in. Not every member of a community -- especially the strong personalities -- has a sense of humor about themselves and their online persona so I commend the guys that participated in this.

A few keystrokes later and the fundraiser was launched. It's essentially a charity dunk tank, with the people you love to hate raising $5 for every softball lobbed at their perch. What's great is that after just a couple hours one side is over 30% towards the goal and the rest of the community is congratulating them for being good sports about the whole thing. With any luck, when this is all over both members will likely be seen in a different light for having gone through this.

Blogger on spamblogs

Blogger Buzz: On Spam describes Google/Blogger's ongoing fight with spamblogs I wrote about a few days ago. They've even published a blacklist of spamblogs to help indexing services weed them out.

I forgot to mention it in my earlier post, but the big white elephant in the room is Wordpress and the affinity spam bloggers have for the WP platform. This is no slag on Matt or the community he's built, it's just the tool they like to use after Blogger. Blogspot is an easy punching bag because it's one giant source host and Google's behind it and has the resources to stop it, but what can we do about the thousands and thousands of wordpress spam blogs republishing RSS feeds from others, loading them up with Adsense banners, and being hosted all over the web? WP is released under GPL and any spamblogging plugin, extension, or tweak of WP code can't really be stopped (this isn't an argument against GPL, but I'm just saying the problem can't be stopped at the point of software being used for bad things).

Do you go after their webhosts? Is the act of gaming search engines with spam blog linkfarms and creating empty content (with others' RSS feed excerpts) adsense sites the same as anti-spam rules in webhosting terms of service agreements?

In other words, when the (single-webhost) blogspot problem gets licked, how on earth do we combat the (many hundreds of webhosts) powered-by-Wordpress spamblog problem?

When it rains, it pours

(67spamblogs, originally uploaded by mathowie)

I have an ego feed I check every few days for my last name (fairly rare) from technorati. On a normal day there might be one or two mentions of my last name and it's not always about me, but it's useful for finding blogs that mentioned me or are talking about a post I made.

This morning, I had 67 matches for the term which is really unusual. Looking at the results painted quite a picture. It looks like one monster spam blogger has unleashed a boatload of new blogspot blogs, always in the form of keyword-(random number).blogspot.com (like lottery-123123.blogspot.com). They suck in RSS feeds from blogs like mine and boingboing and others, then insert random phrases into the copy, with a link to their own sites using phrases they want to game google with (screenshot of one).

This has been going on for a while, commonly known as "blog and ping" tools that automate google gaming by sucking down any RSS feed and reposting to a spammer's blog. But I've never seen someone unleash possibly hundreds (at least 67, probably many more) of blogs in such a short time. I suppose there are scripts that work a level above tools that merely suck down a RSS feed and repost it to a spam blog, unleasing hundreds of rss feeds on hundreds of spam blogs. I don't envy the work Google and Blogspot have to do to curb this kind of behavior but at the same time it's lame to see weblogs become another tool in the search engine spam toolbelt.

update: oh bonus -- looking at a few of them reveals that every spam blog seems to have been created by a different blogger user account. So not only is the sucking down of RSS feeds and reposting to a blog filled with spam links automated, not only is doing this reposting to hundreds of sites automated, but it appears publishing all these hundreds of posts to hundreds of blogs with different blogger login credentials is also automated, making it more difficult for Google/Blogger to weed out the single person behind it all. Search spammer/spam bloggers sure are resourceful little bastards.

Someone should organize an international blogspot flagging day (all about flagging blogspot sites). We could pick a day, say, a saturday in September, then collectively cruise blogspot through the "next blog" button, flagging all the spam blogs that contain 10 links to a single site in every post, loaded up with keywords.

I've been spending a futile 30 minutes each night flagging spamblogs this week, and last night I hit a site I had previously flagged days earlier, and was kind of dismayed to see it still around clogging blogspot and google. I bet a movement of bloggers flagging obvious abuses at blogspot would work just like a "clean up your local park" day might.

If anyone reading this knows the group at Yahoo that recently purchased and is in charge of my favorite blog update service and aggregator, blo.gs, could you let them know the system is completely broken now?

For some reason, every blog I've ever tracked with it is showing that it has updated. Even a blog that shut down and hasn't had a new post in over a year. Sometimes the blogs listed as updated actually did, but it's maybe 1 in 10, with 9 false positives.

Imagine waking up and everytime you check your email you get all your recent messages that claim to be new, and you keep getting them all day, over and over again.

I suspect someone at Yahoo changed the way it figures out what has updated, not relying on pings to the server, but probably sending a bot out to look for changes and getting false positives from things like a new comment or a flickr photo changing in a javascript include.

I'm being forced to move my blog tracking to a RSS service now.

As a side issue, since the day Yahoo took over on blo.gs, they removed the key feature that tracked read/unread status through the use of a last visited cookie and link colors. Please put it back, Yahoo.

Dear preshrunk

This Boston Globe article about blogs that shill products without disclosing their connections is an eye opener. I suspect that as underhanded SEO techniques become more obvious to Google, companies will move into this sort of hidden message marketing by paying bloggers to load up entries with fake testimonials for products they've never used.

Take a look at Jeff Cutler's old blog entries by scrolling down here. You see obvious keyword linking that jumps out like "Credit Cards" and "Funeral Flowers". Of course, Jeff doesn't think he's done anything wrong and the article closes with "In our opinion, paying bloggers is no different than Tiger Woods getting money to wear the Nike logo."

Of course there is an obvious difference: Tiger Woods actually uses Nike products. Also worth noting is that it may very well violate FTC guidelines. [via]

Rebecca Blood started a new feature on her site, setting out to interview bloggers about how they got started, why they do what they do, and what others can learn from that. I was lucky enough to be the first one, and she's posted part one of our interview (part two will be posted Friday).

If you also blog, you'll probably find something useful in it. It was good to talk to Rebecca and get into some hearty questions (mostly in part 2). I'm used to doing interviews with reporters writing for a general audience so it was refreshing to get really specific weblog-oriented questions directed at me.

Interesting, I was awarded a spot on the Always On/Technorati Open Media 100 as a "trendsetter." I don't know how they determined who is on the list or why, or even what "open media" means, but I'll take it and add it to my list of dubious accomplishments like "Shift Magazine's Top 25 Web Personalities."

My favorite weblog update service in the world, blo.gs, was down for a few hours today and I was lost. I could read some of the blogs I track via bloglines, but without all the personality of their site designs (not to mention all their sites' features).

It came back after being down for a few hours, and I instantly noticed something new: the favicon was Yahoo's Y!. That's odd I thought, until I saw the copyright notice along the side: "Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Inc. All Rights Reserved."

Jim was vague about who was going to buy it, but congrats! I'm happy to see it falling in good hands.

For some crazy reason, I (along with K-Rob) will be trying to fill Gina's doc martens over at Lifehacker this week.

I'm using it as an excuse to do a brain dump of all the little hackery ideas I've been brewing for the past few months, but too lazy to write up. Thanks to Movable Type's posting to the future, I've already put a few in the can that will start up tomorrow.

Keep a close watch on Lifehacker this week -- you won't be disappointed.

I just wrote up my thoughts on advertising in RSS and why I think it's a bad thing for now. Feel free to comment here if you think I'm off my rocker.

I'm usually not one to throw around ultimatums, but here's a new personal rule: If you use the term "MSM" in a unironic way to denote the "Mainstream Media" I will write you off as a quack, unsubscribe from your RSS, and stop reading your blog.

There is no "mainstream" media that is well-defined as Them, nor are webloggers suddenly Us. The term "The Media" is so nebulous that it includes us all. The line between the imagined "Us" bloggers and "Them" media outlets is so gray that it can't be drawn. Media outlets in all forms are absorbing blog format, subjects, and culture and blogs of all forms are absorbing media outlets' format, subjects, and culture at a speed so swift it will soon be difficult to tell one from the other, if it hasn't happened already.

You are the media. I am the media. Blogs are a fixture in the mainstream. So when you decry the "MSM" as an imaginary villain, I know I'm done with your site.

It used to be pretty easy to avoid mentions of "MSM" as only a narrow swath of blogs used the term but more and more I keep seeing it show up on the pages of technologists that should be able to see the big picture instead of propping up strawmen to slay on their sites.

Still not with me?

We are the media:

Stories about blogs abound daily:

And we make up TV shows:

Even dorks like me:

So get over yourself and drop the "MSM" bullshit, please.

update: an update, for those new to this site.

I hate comment spam as much as the next guy, so I was surprised when I found out a vacant blog on my system became a giant spam farm over the past few months. I hadn't seen the site in months so when I logged in to check on a configuration, I noticed all the recent trackbacks and comments were for the old standbys of the spam world. Luckily, I had installed the nofollow plugin months ago, so they weren't getting any benefit, but it still hurt to know that I was hosting approximately 3k spam comments and trackbacks.

I killed all trackbacks by selecting them on the all trackback page and de-selecting the 4 or 5 legit ones. The list all comments page was too large and I was getting errors deleting them in a huge batch of 2500 at once.

I figured out a workaround using a handy greasemonkey script. Using checkrange I could go to the edit screen for an entry, select the most recent spam comment, then scroll down to shift-click the very first spam.

With all of them selected, I could wipe them out in one go.

It would have been easier if the edit entry pages had a "select all" link, but it's nice to know the all-purpose greasemonkey tool is there to fill the voids (I could have made a custom script to add the check all link to the MT admin, but this was already written and easy).

In other news, I recently upgraded to the new MT 3.16 version, which seemed to fix a lot of little problems here on the site. One of the big ones was a problem using TypeKey for comments. It seems to be good now which means I'll be opening comments on posts from time to time. I got a lot of email on the ajax post from yesterday, so I've turned comments on for it. Now I just need to finish moving the rest of the site to a new template.

I didn't think I'd like it as much as I already do, but Sploid is pretty damn good. Simple, bold headlines that grab your attention and are presented in a nicer format than something like the drudge report, and it's got none of the pesky personal politics of drudge (yet). Denton should have done this site years ago.

The funny thing is when you realize this "fresh new take" on the news is just another view of things commonly seen on weblogs like delicious links or link sidebars. In fact, with about 15 minutes of tweaking, I could create a clone of sploid that used my delicious feed as the source for headlines. I just might do that later tonight, as a lark.

Announcing something I've been playing with over the past few nights: Fitlog

The reasoning behind the site is in the first post to it, and I'm also fulfilling a promise to try out WordPress, especially the "custom fields" option, which I'm using to track my daily weight, time ridden or run, and distance ridden or run. Since it's all in a database, I'm also using PHP/SWF Charts to plot a live graph of my data over time (eventually I'll graph all the new fields, once I start running and riding more).

So far it's fun and a great motivation to get out and exercise each day, and my hope is that I succeed in front of everyone's watchful gaze instead of failing miserably, which of course, is always a possibility.

Blogspot is currently broken. While it always aimed to be the place to get a free weblog, it has been the subject of various exploits and gaming.

Case in point: yesterday I got a porn spam that slipped through since the from: line was set to my own email, and amid the garbage text was a URL on blogspot. This URL:
http://trampling-high-heels3169.blogspot.com/

If you go there and check it out, it pretty much as the exact same text as the spam, but the URL leads to the spammer's real target site.

A friend recently returned from a anti-spam conference and said someone gave a demo of a spamming tool. They showed how it grabbed a zillion email addresses from a database, started churning out the email while hopping from one free open proxy server to another, and one curious last step was to automatically create a new blogger account, create a new site on blogspot, and load the email text from the spam as an entry. The last step was to raise the search engine position for the spammer's site and message and was completely automated.

When folks are using a blog host for spam and it becomes a key feature of automated spamming tools, I think it's time to fix it.

How about adding a captcha at the very least, to thwart those doing automatic script-based spaming of blogspot?

pb explains why he won't read RSS feeds with ads and though I won't unsubscribe from feeds with ads, I am annoyed with them for many reasons that pb states, but there's one other big aspect of it.

Ads in RSS are fundamentally misguided, at least all the examples I've seen. They're either a site-wide sponsor or a completely unrelated product, but the thing that is broken about them is that they don't offer anything to the reader.

I'm convinced that things like Google's adsense ads work because they're tied so well to the content of what someone is saying, and the best place for them to appear is in archived posts. When random folks do a search and find your post about a subject while they are researching the subject, ads that are closely related often help out the research. I've found myself searching for a gadget, ending up on a blog, and following an ad for a sale price on said gadget. This is one of the few times where advertising that is so targeted can be actually helpful.

Ads in RSS are mostly in the way. They don't key off the text very well, and I don't really use RSS for research purposes. I haven't seen a RSS ad yet for anything I would want to learn more about. I do click on many interesting random blogads if they're for something amusing (like a funny t-shirt) or compelling (like a new PBS program or issue-oriented site), so I guess maybe the good advertisers just haven't caught on to RSS yet.

There is something sinister deep down about stuffing ads into content that is purposely stripped of cruft. But I'm also aware that RSS feed reading is hitting the mainstream and many readers are no longer using browsers. I just don't think the majority of money in advertising is with your current daily reader base, but in your archives.

It's still pretty early in the RSS ads development. If folks can figure out ways to do site-specific classified-type advertising or figure out how to marry truly targetted ads, maybe it could work but for now they're obnoxious and in the way.

Buffington launches the great experiment: start a topical blog about something in the press to see what kind of adsense performance comes out of it. I know a lot of people have been joking about starting blogs about the top 10 most expensive keywords, but Michael was the first to actually try it out. Can't wait to see how it pans out.

I linked to Luke's wonderful new site before but moment 9 and moment 12 reminded me why I need to send his URL to all my friends.

A few months ago, I was thinking about all the questions I wished I could ask someone that helped develop the TiVo user interface, and then I realized there was nothing stopping me from just emailing and asking. After a bit of friend-of-a-friend networking, I got in touch with the Director of TiVo User Experience, and got ten questions I've always wanted to ask answered. I posted the full interview here on PVRblog.

If you remember the old six degrees phenomena, anyone is 6 hops or less away from you. In the age of email and social software, I bet it's more like 4 hops or less (Margret was 2 hops away). If there's a lesson for other webloggers here, it's this: if there's something you've always wanted to ask one of your idols or you have an idea for an interview you'd like to see, there's nothing stopping you from tracking the right person down and getting the answers you wanted. I urge you to give it a try someday.

Someone on MetaFilter pointed to this blog by a new San Diego cop and though they say he was formerly a bit of a power hungry campus security cop at UCSD, I can't help but enjoy following along in his daily entries.

Early on when I started blogging, the one thing I loved reading about was people from different walks of life and in different professions. Basically when blogging started every single person doing it was a web designer, so when you saw a blog by anyone else, it was novel.

Back in 2000, I wanted to start a bunch of blogs done by folks in all sorts of regular jobs, called something like "Day in the Life" blogs. The idea was that if you could get a cop, doctor, chef, lawyer, car mechanic, dentist, accountant, and others to blog, you could have a rich, engaging, living archive of what it's like to be in various types of work. The goal was to have this group of blogs available for teens to read, to help them answer the elusive question "what do you want to be when you grow up?" which everyone seemed to pester me with when I was 14.

The rub is that you need to find a dozen really interesting people and good writers in all those walks of life to participate, and they all need to have the time and motivation to contribute to the project, despite their likely active lives. As we near 2005, however, I bet you could just build up a blogroll that could effectively become the project, based on blogs that have launched since then (for instance, this would be the Policeman blog).

The South by Southwest Interactive conference runs from March 11-15, in Austin, Texas. I'm giving a talk on community stuff one of those days. Etech runs from March 14-17, 2005 in San Diego, CA, though I'm guessing the first two days are just tutorials no one goes to. I'm giving a talk with Mike there as well.

So that's basically Saturday through Friday of constant conference stimulation, with lots of drinking, in two different laid back cities. It's going to be a long week.

You know, with all the DIY/reality programming out there, I'm surprised that I can't find anyone that was ever on MTV's Pimp My Ride that has a blog. Or anyone that was on Overhaulin'. Or anyone ever on Divine Design. Or anyone from HGTV's trifecta Landscaper's Challenge/Designer's Challenge/Weekend Warriors.

I've always wondered what people think of their new spaces/cars/lives six months or a year later. I remember when Trading Spaces first hit a couple tell-all essays from participants showed up in newspapers, but given that millions are blogging, I'm surprised I can't easily find a reality/DIY show alum with a blog somewhere.

Honestly, I just want to hear that having seven monitors or $5k wheels on your car sucks after the camera leaves.

Ev took my previous statements to task, and I do admit I was light on examples. I was seeing my own site in search after search but didn't bother to document them. Typepad offers a nice stat and referrer interface, so I just took a peek to grab some examples of what I was talking about. These aren't my searches, but instead what people search for online and end up on my site. The following is a list of every search referrer that lead to the site for the past 2 hours (from 4:30PM to 6:30PM 7/23/03), keeping in mind that tomorrow the site is officially one week old:

tivo phone prefix
phillips dsr 7000 #1 and I barely mentioned it
tivo hack service call
hacking tivo series 2 another number 1
phillips dsr 7000 hard drive number 1 again
tivo series 2 setup network modem
hacking tivo I don't see the site in these listings, though in the first few pages I noted lots of blogs
phillips dsr 7000 "home media" the only result
phillips dsr 7000
tivo dialing ethernet
phillips dsr 7000 support #1 result, and it leads to the front page instead of a post
linux pvr

Some of the posts on the PVRblog are helpful to the search terms being used here, but I would say the many (half? the majority?) aren't that useful.

Do I hate blogs? Of course not, but I've been doing lots of research online recently (about music, elections, mortgages, and gadgets), and blogs are showing up for all sorts of things, and they're not always helpful or directly related to the information I'm seeking. And again, i don't think blog authors are doing it consciously, and I don't think Google is favoring blogs for any special reason besides they happen to have all the properties of a great indexable site. I didn't set out to give the blog haters credit for "ruining google," I'm just making an observation here that I can no longer ignore. I love Google and it's by far the best research tool out there, I just hope it can stay that way, especially when the flood of new users from services like AOL Journals start going online by the thousands.

note: update to this post

As much as I hate to say it, I'm starting to buy the whole "blogs are ruining search engines" hype that's been spread around these past few months. Let's look at what types of things a search engine like Google likes to see:

- frequent updates to webpages
- many incoming links
- meaningful page titles
- important text wrapped in header elements
- meaningful page filenames

In the web's history, few sites did all the above well, so using these properties as criteria in locating good sites could be reliable. I think it's a total accident that blogs do all of the above well, especially those with nice Movable Type setups that create meaningful page titles and filenames, and those designed with CSS and using well-structured content. I don't think people set out to do each thing specifically to gain in google rankings, but the cumulative effect of all the above is pushing blogs high into searches for almost anything.

Now that I'm doing the PVR blog, I'm doing a bit of research for every post and when I run searches for TiVo and other terms, I'm finding a disturbing number of basic searches end up with the PVR blog in the top ten. Someone might point that out as a great success, but keep in mind the site started on Thursday of last week — it's 4 days old.

Tonight I started to write up a review of a product and found that a search for the product name gives my photos of said product as the #1 result, with the actual product in second place. My site is days old but outperforming the more useful site that has been around for a couple years.

Something isn't right in Googleville and perhaps it's time to figure out new criteria for predicting a high quality informational site that doesn't instantly favor blogs.

This idea for a September 11 photoblog is a great one, and something I'll be participating in. While it seems a lot like the Behind the Curtain project in 2000 (my entry), I like the extra meaning attached to this project. It's not just photographing your life for 24 hours for the hell of it or the pure vanity. It feels more like something that will produce a collective work that says "here is what humanity is like, what we hold near and dear, and why we celebrate life." It's being held on a day that will forever be a dark anniversary, but I'm glad to see some attempt at injecting light into it.

I posted on blogroots about an RSS-to-IMAP feature over at Blogstreet, but I have to mention it again here because it's one of my favorite new things I've seen in the world of weblogging. I share time between operating systems, so none of the myriad of RSS readers worked for me in the long run. Reading weblogs via IMAP email across two computers works beautifully, and you can even forward posts onto your blog through email. I've also noticed I can keep all the messages and essentially have a searchable, personalized archive of weblogs I read. If I remember hearing about a crazy new doohickey that was mentioned somewhere a few weeks ago, I can find it with a keyword or two in my email app.

Aside from weblog software, this is one of the first features I'd pay for, if I could.

Bummer news of the day: Ghyslain Pursues Legal Action

If the kid wanted this whole mess to be forgotten, starting a lawsuit against other classmates is the best way to prolong the pain as much as possible, and further ostracize him at school.

I mean, it was a horrible thing they did to him, and we've all done silly things like dance around in private and some of us have also been caught to varying degrees, but I don't know if legal action, even if successful, is the best way to feel better for him.

Freaky: Anil found an old post of mine laying out the blogshares idea.

If I remember correctly, the application was actually planned out, a domain was bought by someone else, and I was going to host it. We couldn't figure out a way to automatically do the metrics though, since there wasn't a blogdex, nor a daypop or technorati to automatically give us data. There weren't any xml apis either, it was going to be done by scraping the single web index at the time (long since dead).

I haven't heard anyone use the term "Information Superhighway" in a very long time. Remember when a giant network of interconnected computers all over the globe was such a tough idea to grasp?

I'm going to do my part and use it as often as possible.

Using a mixture of duct tape, pipe cleaners, and old tupperware bowls, I've now got my phone talking to my blog.

Starting with pop2blog, I hacked it to only keep track of attached images and email subjects, ignoring the rest of the message. It also only transmits image names as new posts to Movable Type on this server. It's on another server though, since some of the perl modules required weren't available to my activestate perl install's package manager (thanks chris for figuring out a workaround). I'm doing more CSS tricks to display a short 100px tall peek at the images, and if you click through you'll see the full image (still working on the archive pages for images).

So to recap, I take a photo with my phone, push about 7 buttons to send it off to a secret email account on one server. A cronjob on a different server checks the account every 10 minutes, then processes the messages and sends the results to a third server via xml-prc, which updates a movable type blog (including one custom template to produce the table you see above, and another template to create the CSS on the fly), which is included in another movable type blog (the one you are reading). Three servers, two blogs (with custom templates), a phone, and bunch of rudimentary glue code. Now you can see why I'm surprised it worked at all.

Flag day

Someone should organize an international blogspot flagging day (all about flagging blogspot sites). We could pick a day, say, a saturday in September, then collectively cruise blogspot through the "next blog" button, flagging all the spam blogs that contain 10 links to a single site in every post, loaded up with keywords.

I've been spending a futile 30 minutes each night flagging spamblogs this week, and last night I hit a site I had previously flagged days earlier, and was kind of dismayed to see it still around clogging blogspot and google. I bet a movement of bloggers flagging obvious abuses at blogspot would work just like a "clean up your local park" day might.

All new, all the time

If anyone reading this knows the group at Yahoo that recently purchased and is in charge of my favorite blog update service and aggregator, blo.gs, could you let them know the system is completely broken now?

For some reason, every blog I've ever tracked with it is showing that it has updated. Even a blog that shut down and hasn't had a new post in over a year. Sometimes the blogs listed as updated actually did, but it's maybe 1 in 10, with 9 false positives.

Imagine waking up and everytime you check your email you get all your recent messages that claim to be new, and you keep getting them all day, over and over again.

I suspect someone at Yahoo changed the way it figures out what has updated, not relying on pings to the server, but probably sending a bot out to look for changes and getting false positives from things like a new comment or a flickr photo changing in a javascript include.

I'm being forced to move my blog tracking to a RSS service now.

As a side issue, since the day Yahoo took over on blo.gs, they removed the key feature that tracked read/unread status through the use of a last visited cookie and link colors. Please put it back, Yahoo.

heh

Dear preshrunk

Marketing shills

This Boston Globe article about blogs that shill products without disclosing their connections is an eye opener. I suspect that as underhanded SEO techniques become more obvious to Google, companies will move into this sort of hidden message marketing by paying bloggers to load up entries with fake testimonials for products they've never used.

Take a look at Jeff Cutler's old blog entries by scrolling down here. You see obvious keyword linking that jumps out like "Credit Cards" and "Funeral Flowers". Of course, Jeff doesn't think he's done anything wrong and the article closes with "In our opinion, paying bloggers is no different than Tiger Woods getting money to wear the Nike logo."

Of course there is an obvious difference: Tiger Woods actually uses Nike products. Also worth noting is that it may very well violate FTC guidelines. [via]

New interview

Rebecca Blood started a new feature on her site, setting out to interview bloggers about how they got started, why they do what they do, and what others can learn from that. I was lucky enough to be the first one, and she's posted part one of our interview (part two will be posted Friday).

If you also blog, you'll probably find something useful in it. It was good to talk to Rebecca and get into some hearty questions (mostly in part 2). I'm used to doing interviews with reporters writing for a general audience so it was refreshing to get really specific weblog-oriented questions directed at me.

I don't know what to think of things like this

Interesting, I was awarded a spot on the Always On/Technorati Open Media 100 as a "trendsetter." I don't know how they determined who is on the list or why, or even what "open media" means, but I'll take it and add it to my list of dubious accomplishments like "Shift Magazine's Top 25 Web Personalities."

Oh mY! god

My favorite weblog update service in the world, blo.gs, was down for a few hours today and I was lost. I could read some of the blogs I track via bloglines, but without all the personality of their site designs (not to mention all their sites' features).

It came back after being down for a few hours, and I instantly noticed something new: the favicon was Yahoo's Y!. That's odd I thought, until I saw the copyright notice along the side: "Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Inc. All Rights Reserved."

Jim was vague about who was going to buy it, but congrats! I'm happy to see it falling in good hands.

Lifehacking

For some crazy reason, I (along with K-Rob) will be trying to fill Gina's doc martens over at Lifehacker this week.

I'm using it as an excuse to do a brain dump of all the little hackery ideas I've been brewing for the past few months, but too lazy to write up. Thanks to Movable Type's posting to the future, I've already put a few in the can that will start up tomorrow.

Keep a close watch on Lifehacker this week -- you won't be disappointed.

No ads in RSS

I just wrote up my thoughts on advertising in RSS and why I think it's a bad thing for now. Feel free to comment here if you think I'm off my rocker.

New rule

I'm usually not one to throw around ultimatums, but here's a new personal rule: If you use the term "MSM" in a unironic way to denote the "Mainstream Media" I will write you off as a quack, unsubscribe from your RSS, and stop reading your blog.

There is no "mainstream" media that is well-defined as Them, nor are webloggers suddenly Us. The term "The Media" is so nebulous that it includes us all. The line between the imagined "Us" bloggers and "Them" media outlets is so gray that it can't be drawn. Media outlets in all forms are absorbing blog format, subjects, and culture and blogs of all forms are absorbing media outlets' format, subjects, and culture at a speed so swift it will soon be difficult to tell one from the other, if it hasn't happened already.

You are the media. I am the media. Blogs are a fixture in the mainstream. So when you decry the "MSM" as an imaginary villain, I know I'm done with your site.

It used to be pretty easy to avoid mentions of "MSM" as only a narrow swath of blogs used the term but more and more I keep seeing it show up on the pages of technologists that should be able to see the big picture instead of propping up strawmen to slay on their sites.

Still not with me?

We are the media:

Stories about blogs abound daily:

And we make up TV shows:

Even dorks like me:

So get over yourself and drop the "MSM" bullshit, please.

update: an update, for those new to this site.

Greasemonkey and MT

I hate comment spam as much as the next guy, so I was surprised when I found out a vacant blog on my system became a giant spam farm over the past few months. I hadn't seen the site in months so when I logged in to check on a configuration, I noticed all the recent trackbacks and comments were for the old standbys of the spam world. Luckily, I had installed the nofollow plugin months ago, so they weren't getting any benefit, but it still hurt to know that I was hosting approximately 3k spam comments and trackbacks.

I killed all trackbacks by selecting them on the all trackback page and de-selecting the 4 or 5 legit ones. The list all comments page was too large and I was getting errors deleting them in a huge batch of 2500 at once.

I figured out a workaround using a handy greasemonkey script. Using checkrange I could go to the edit screen for an entry, select the most recent spam comment, then scroll down to shift-click the very first spam.

With all of them selected, I could wipe them out in one go.

It would have been easier if the edit entry pages had a "select all" link, but it's nice to know the all-purpose greasemonkey tool is there to fill the voids (I could have made a custom script to add the check all link to the MT admin, but this was already written and easy).

In other news, I recently upgraded to the new MT 3.16 version, which seemed to fix a lot of little problems here on the site. One of the big ones was a problem using TypeKey for comments. It seems to be good now which means I'll be opening comments on posts from time to time. I got a lot of email on the ajax post from yesterday, so I've turned comments on for it. Now I just need to finish moving the rest of the site to a new template.

Sploid's good

I didn't think I'd like it as much as I already do, but Sploid is pretty damn good. Simple, bold headlines that grab your attention and are presented in a nicer format than something like the drudge report, and it's got none of the pesky personal politics of drudge (yet). Denton should have done this site years ago.

The funny thing is when you realize this "fresh new take" on the news is just another view of things commonly seen on weblogs like delicious links or link sidebars. In fact, with about 15 minutes of tweaking, I could create a clone of sploid that used my delicious feed as the source for headlines. I just might do that later tonight, as a lark.

Using peer pressure to your benefit

Announcing something I've been playing with over the past few nights: Fitlog

The reasoning behind the site is in the first post to it, and I'm also fulfilling a promise to try out WordPress, especially the "custom fields" option, which I'm using to track my daily weight, time ridden or run, and distance ridden or run. Since it's all in a database, I'm also using PHP/SWF Charts to plot a live graph of my data over time (eventually I'll graph all the new fields, once I start running and riding more).

So far it's fun and a great motivation to get out and exercise each day, and my hope is that I succeed in front of everyone's watchful gaze instead of failing miserably, which of course, is always a possibility.

Blogspot is hurting America

Blogspot is currently broken. While it always aimed to be the place to get a free weblog, it has been the subject of various exploits and gaming.

Case in point: yesterday I got a porn spam that slipped through since the from: line was set to my own email, and amid the garbage text was a URL on blogspot. This URL:
http://trampling-high-heels3169.blogspot.com/

If you go there and check it out, it pretty much as the exact same text as the spam, but the URL leads to the spammer's real target site.

A friend recently returned from a anti-spam conference and said someone gave a demo of a spamming tool. They showed how it grabbed a zillion email addresses from a database, started churning out the email while hopping from one free open proxy server to another, and one curious last step was to automatically create a new blogger account, create a new site on blogspot, and load the email text from the spam as an entry. The last step was to raise the search engine position for the spammer's site and message and was completely automated.

When folks are using a blog host for spam and it becomes a key feature of automated spamming tools, I think it's time to fix it.

How about adding a captcha at the very least, to thwart those doing automatic script-based spaming of blogspot?

ads in RSS

pb explains why he won't read RSS feeds with ads and though I won't unsubscribe from feeds with ads, I am annoyed with them for many reasons that pb states, but there's one other big aspect of it.

Ads in RSS are fundamentally misguided, at least all the examples I've seen. They're either a site-wide sponsor or a completely unrelated product, but the thing that is broken about them is that they don't offer anything to the reader.

I'm convinced that things like Google's adsense ads work because they're tied so well to the content of what someone is saying, and the best place for them to appear is in archived posts. When random folks do a search and find your post about a subject while they are researching the subject, ads that are closely related often help out the research. I've found myself searching for a gadget, ending up on a blog, and following an ad for a sale price on said gadget. This is one of the few times where advertising that is so targeted can be actually helpful.

Ads in RSS are mostly in the way. They don't key off the text very well, and I don't really use RSS for research purposes. I haven't seen a RSS ad yet for anything I would want to learn more about. I do click on many interesting random blogads if they're for something amusing (like a funny t-shirt) or compelling (like a new PBS program or issue-oriented site), so I guess maybe the good advertisers just haven't caught on to RSS yet.

There is something sinister deep down about stuffing ads into content that is purposely stripped of cruft. But I'm also aware that RSS feed reading is hitting the mainstream and many readers are no longer using browsers. I just don't think the majority of money in advertising is with your current daily reader base, but in your archives.

It's still pretty early in the RSS ads development. If folks can figure out ways to do site-specific classified-type advertising or figure out how to marry truly targetted ads, maybe it could work but for now they're obnoxious and in the way.

Good luck, Jason

Like a cancer on blogs

Buffington launches the great experiment: start a topical blog about something in the press to see what kind of adsense performance comes out of it. I know a lot of people have been joking about starting blogs about the top 10 most expensive keywords, but Michael was the first to actually try it out. Can't wait to see how it pans out.

Just Plain Good Writing

I linked to Luke's wonderful new site before but moment 9 and moment 12 reminded me why I need to send his URL to all my friends.

Don't just read the news, make it

A few months ago, I was thinking about all the questions I wished I could ask someone that helped develop the TiVo user interface, and then I realized there was nothing stopping me from just emailing and asking. After a bit of friend-of-a-friend networking, I got in touch with the Director of TiVo User Experience, and got ten questions I've always wanted to ask answered. I posted the full interview here on PVRblog.

If you remember the old six degrees phenomena, anyone is 6 hops or less away from you. In the age of email and social software, I bet it's more like 4 hops or less (Margret was 2 hops away). If there's a lesson for other webloggers here, it's this: if there's something you've always wanted to ask one of your idols or you have an idea for an interview you'd like to see, there's nothing stopping you from tracking the right person down and getting the answers you wanted. I urge you to give it a try someday.

Day in the life blogs

Someone on MetaFilter pointed to this blog by a new San Diego cop and though they say he was formerly a bit of a power hungry campus security cop at UCSD, I can't help but enjoy following along in his daily entries.

Early on when I started blogging, the one thing I loved reading about was people from different walks of life and in different professions. Basically when blogging started every single person doing it was a web designer, so when you saw a blog by anyone else, it was novel.

Back in 2000, I wanted to start a bunch of blogs done by folks in all sorts of regular jobs, called something like "Day in the Life" blogs. The idea was that if you could get a cop, doctor, chef, lawyer, car mechanic, dentist, accountant, and others to blog, you could have a rich, engaging, living archive of what it's like to be in various types of work. The goal was to have this group of blogs available for teens to read, to help them answer the elusive question "what do you want to be when you grow up?" which everyone seemed to pester me with when I was 14.

The rub is that you need to find a dozen really interesting people and good writers in all those walks of life to participate, and they all need to have the time and motivation to contribute to the project, despite their likely active lives. As we near 2005, however, I bet you could just build up a blogroll that could effectively become the project, based on blogs that have launched since then (for instance, this would be the Policeman blog).

South by Eee Tech

The South by Southwest Interactive conference runs from March 11-15, in Austin, Texas. I'm giving a talk on community stuff one of those days. Etech runs from March 14-17, 2005 in San Diego, CA, though I'm guessing the first two days are just tutorials no one goes to. I'm giving a talk with Mike there as well.

So that's basically Saturday through Friday of constant conference stimulation, with lots of drinking, in two different laid back cities. It's going to be a long week.

Reality Blogging

You know, with all the DIY/reality programming out there, I'm surprised that I can't find anyone that was ever on MTV's Pimp My Ride that has a blog. Or anyone that was on Overhaulin'. Or anyone ever on Divine Design. Or anyone from HGTV's trifecta Landscaper's Challenge/Designer's Challenge/Weekend Warriors.

I've always wondered what people think of their new spaces/cars/lives six months or a year later. I remember when Trading Spaces first hit a couple tell-all essays from participants showed up in newspapers, but given that millions are blogging, I'm surprised I can't easily find a reality/DIY show alum with a blog somewhere.

Honestly, I just want to hear that having seven monitors or $5k wheels on your car sucks after the camera leaves.

Some Examples

Ev took my previous statements to task, and I do admit I was light on examples. I was seeing my own site in search after search but didn't bother to document them. Typepad offers a nice stat and referrer interface, so I just took a peek to grab some examples of what I was talking about. These aren't my searches, but instead what people search for online and end up on my site. The following is a list of every search referrer that lead to the site for the past 2 hours (from 4:30PM to 6:30PM 7/23/03), keeping in mind that tomorrow the site is officially one week old:

tivo phone prefix
phillips dsr 7000 #1 and I barely mentioned it
tivo hack service call
hacking tivo series 2 another number 1
phillips dsr 7000 hard drive number 1 again
tivo series 2 setup network modem
hacking tivo I don't see the site in these listings, though in the first few pages I noted lots of blogs
phillips dsr 7000 "home media" the only result
phillips dsr 7000
tivo dialing ethernet
phillips dsr 7000 support #1 result, and it leads to the front page instead of a post
linux pvr

Some of the posts on the PVRblog are helpful to the search terms being used here, but I would say the many (half? the majority?) aren't that useful.

Do I hate blogs? Of course not, but I've been doing lots of research online recently (about music, elections, mortgages, and gadgets), and blogs are showing up for all sorts of things, and they're not always helpful or directly related to the information I'm seeking. And again, i don't think blog authors are doing it consciously, and I don't think Google is favoring blogs for any special reason besides they happen to have all the properties of a great indexable site. I didn't set out to give the blog haters credit for "ruining google," I'm just making an observation here that I can no longer ignore. I love Google and it's by far the best research tool out there, I just hope it can stay that way, especially when the flood of new users from services like AOL Journals start going online by the thousands.

Maybe I should write for the Register UK too

note: update to this post

As much as I hate to say it, I'm starting to buy the whole "blogs are ruining search engines" hype that's been spread around these past few months. Let's look at what types of things a search engine like Google likes to see:

- frequent updates to webpages
- many incoming links
- meaningful page titles
- important text wrapped in header elements
- meaningful page filenames

In the web's history, few sites did all the above well, so using these properties as criteria in locating good sites could be reliable. I think it's a total accident that blogs do all of the above well, especially those with nice Movable Type setups that create meaningful page titles and filenames, and those designed with CSS and using well-structured content. I don't think people set out to do each thing specifically to gain in google rankings, but the cumulative effect of all the above is pushing blogs high into searches for almost anything.

Now that I'm doing the PVR blog, I'm doing a bit of research for every post and when I run searches for TiVo and other terms, I'm finding a disturbing number of basic searches end up with the PVR blog in the top ten. Someone might point that out as a great success, but keep in mind the site started on Thursday of last week — it's 4 days old.

Tonight I started to write up a review of a product and found that a search for the product name gives my photos of said product as the #1 result, with the actual product in second place. My site is days old but outperforming the more useful site that has been around for a couple years.

Something isn't right in Googleville and perhaps it's time to figure out new criteria for predicting a high quality informational site that doesn't instantly favor blogs.

Sept 11th Photoblog

This idea for a September 11 photoblog is a great one, and something I'll be participating in. While it seems a lot like the Behind the Curtain project in 2000 (my entry), I like the extra meaning attached to this project. It's not just photographing your life for 24 hours for the hell of it or the pure vanity. It feels more like something that will produce a collective work that says "here is what humanity is like, what we hold near and dear, and why we celebrate life." It's being held on a day that will forever be a dark anniversary, but I'm glad to see some attempt at injecting light into it.

The first RSS app I like

I posted on blogroots about an RSS-to-IMAP feature over at Blogstreet, but I have to mention it again here because it's one of my favorite new things I've seen in the world of weblogging. I share time between operating systems, so none of the myriad of RSS readers worked for me in the long run. Reading weblogs via IMAP email across two computers works beautifully, and you can even forward posts onto your blog through email. I've also noticed I can keep all the messages and essentially have a searchable, personalized archive of weblogs I read. If I remember hearing about a crazy new doohickey that was mentioned somewhere a few weeks ago, I can find it with a keyword or two in my email app.

Aside from weblog software, this is one of the first features I'd pay for, if I could.

Star Wars Episode 3: the lawsuit

Bummer news of the day: Ghyslain Pursues Legal Action

If the kid wanted this whole mess to be forgotten, starting a lawsuit against other classmates is the best way to prolong the pain as much as possible, and further ostracize him at school.

I mean, it was a horrible thing they did to him, and we've all done silly things like dance around in private and some of us have also been caught to varying degrees, but I don't know if legal action, even if successful, is the best way to feel better for him.

Blogsharing time travels

Freaky: Anil found an old post of mine laying out the blogshares idea.

If I remember correctly, the application was actually planned out, a domain was bought by someone else, and I was going to host it. We couldn't figure out a way to automatically do the metrics though, since there wasn't a blogdex, nor a daypop or technorati to automatically give us data. There weren't any xml apis either, it was going to be done by scraping the single web index at the time (long since dead).

and AT & T will bring you there

I haven't heard anyone use the term "Information Superhighway" in a very long time. Remember when a giant network of interconnected computers all over the globe was such a tough idea to grasp?

I'm going to do my part and use it as often as possible.

Moblogging with MT, pop2blog and my phone

Using a mixture of duct tape, pipe cleaners, and old tupperware bowls, I've now got my phone talking to my blog.

Starting with pop2blog, I hacked it to only keep track of attached images and email subjects, ignoring the rest of the message. It also only transmits image names as new posts to Movable Type on this server. It's on another server though, since some of the perl modules required weren't available to my activestate perl install's package manager (thanks chris for figuring out a workaround). I'm doing more CSS tricks to display a short 100px tall peek at the images, and if you click through you'll see the full image (still working on the archive pages for images).

So to recap, I take a photo with my phone, push about 7 buttons to send it off to a secret email account on one server. A cronjob on a different server checks the account every 10 minutes, then processes the messages and sends the results to a third server via xml-prc, which updates a movable type blog (including one custom template to produce the table you see above, and another template to create the CSS on the fly), which is included in another movable type blog (the one you are reading). Three servers, two blogs (with custom templates), a phone, and bunch of rudimentary glue code. Now you can see why I'm surprised it worked at all.