weblogs

I’ve been blogging since around November 2000 (arguably, earlier than that, that’s just when I started using software on the backend); this is for posts generally about blogging.

List of Dangerous Bloggers

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Twilight Invasion recently posted a list of people who’ve been fired because of their weblog. Interesting to read the stories other than mine.

Apparently, this list should also include Stephen Stewart, though with only a post-by-post method of trawling the archives, I didn’t attempt to dig backwards through 18 months of posts to see if there’s a more specific mention on his site.

Anyone else?

TypePad IDs are TypeKey IDs!

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Has this information been made public yet?

Mark Pilgrim‘s b-links pointed to this post that uses Six Apart‘s new TypeKey comment registration system. Even before reading the post itself, I noticed the “sign in” link for TypeKey, and since I’m curious about how it is going to function, I figured I’d see if I could set up an account.

I hit the sign in link, and then went to the registration page. When I put in my usual login name, though, I was told that that ID was already in use. Since I hadn’t signed up for TypeKey previously, this came as something as a surprise to me.

Suddenly curious, I went back to the sign in page and tried logging in using my TypePad login — and what do you know, it worked! Nifty — apparently, anyone who uses TypePad to run their weblog auto-magically has a TypeKey login.

(Moments later…) Aha — apparently I wasn’t the first person to discover this: Michel Vuijlsteke pointed this out in the comment thread. Damn, and here I thought I was getting a scoop….

(A few more moments later…) Argh — David Ely beat me to it too. ;)

One downside I’m seeing right away: when I leave a TypeKey-authenticated comment, my name shows as “djwudi” rather than as “Michael Hanscom”, and I can’t seem to find a way to change that. Hmmmm….

So now the question becomes, when do TypePad users get to start playing with TypeKey on our weblogs?

Ecto for Windows

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A few months ago Alex Hung, one of the regulars in the TypePad User Group, announced that he was working on a Windows-based application for posting to TypePad and MovableType-based weblogs that he was calling TypeWriter. Not being a Windows user I didn’t have a lot of use for this, but I watched his progress as he posted updates on his project in the forums.

Earlier this week, Alex, Adriaan Tijsseling, and Joi Ito jointly announced that they have joined forces, and TypeWriter has now become Ecto for Windows.

Congrats to all involved!

(via Boing Boing)

Kinja

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So all the buzz over the past few days (aside from whether or not Google’s e-mail service is an April Fool’s Joke or not) has been Kinja. Essentially, Kinja is yet another web-based news aggregator, this time with the stated goal of exposing more weblogs to people who aren’t already sucked into the weblog world.

Of course, I’ve signed up, added all the feeds I subscribe to (hooray for data export and import), and made my Kinja page public so that anyone can stop by and get an idea of what I’m pumping into my brain each day.

Being a long-time NetNewsWire user, I’m a bit underwhelmed…but then, Kinja wasn’t made for people like me, but rather for the “unwashed masses” who still think that USA Today and Fox News are the best places to get all of their reading material. Still, it’ll be interesting to see if this goes anywhere.

iTunes: “Open Arms” by Journey from the album Pop Music: The Modern Era 1976-1999 (1981, 3:20).

Chronological vs. Chronoillogical

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While I won’t be swapping my post order around, Monday’s discussion on weblog post order has resulted in one small change here on Eclecticism.

Until now, I’ve had my monthly archive pages displayed in “newest to oldest” format to match the main page. This made sense at the time, but after spending a little time scrolling through and searching for specific posts, I’ve swapped the monthly archive pages around to display chronologically, with the beginning of the month at the top of the page. Far easier to browse through now, I think.

That’ll be the extent of the changes I’m making here, but in Eric’s followup post “First Order Solutions“, he proposes a possible solution that would allow for a chronological first page that would use cookies to collapse already-viewed posts to just the headline, leaving new posts expanded to be easily read. It sounds worth experimenting with, though I’m still not entirely sold.

First off, it could create a lot of unnecessary clicking if someone was searching through the page for a recently posted bit of information (expand one post, look through, close it, expand the next…or expand them all and scroll, scroll, scroll). It reminded me of something that Shelley quoted in her response to Eric’s post, from one of her posts in 2002:

A weblogger’s nightmare:

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

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

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

Also, just how much information will the front page hold under Eric’s scheme, and for how long will it stay? I see two possible options: either the page just keeps gathering new posts for the month (and eventually any visitor would have to scroll down through a page or two of collapsed headlines to find the recent posts), or as Chris Vincent points out, there would be the visual oddity of having older posts drop off the top of the page as new posts are added to the bottom.

Some interesting ideas, I’m just not entirely sold yet as to their practicality.

I was flattered, though, to get a compliment from Eric in his post, though…

…Michael wrote an entire post in chronoillogical format, with the paragraphs running last to first. The interesting part is that it made almost as much sense that way as forward, which is either a testament to Michael’s writing skills or else an indication that I’m wrong about the nature of writing. (Hey, why not give my critics more ammo?)

iTunes: “Where I’m From (Aural G. Ride Novox)” by Digable Planets from the album Where I’m From (1992, 4:50).

Sosumi

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On the bright side, webloggers now have protection against libel suits:

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that Web loggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can’t be held responsible for libel for information they republish, extending crucial First Amendment protections to do-it-yourself online publishers.

Online free speech advocates praised the decision as a victory. The ruling effectively differentiates conventional news media, which can be sued relatively easily for libel, from certain forms of online communication such as moderated e-mail lists. One implication is that DIY publishers like bloggers cannot be sued as easily.

On the downside, though, the case that prompted this decision is truly bizarre, and I have to feel sorry for the woman whose case was just overturned by the ruling.

The case traces back to a North Carolina town in 1999, where handyman Robert Smith was repairing a truck owned by attorney and art collector Ellen Batzel. Smith claimed to have overheard Batzel say she was related to Nazi Gestapo head Heinrich Himmler. He said he concluded that the European paintings he saw in her home must be stolen goods, and shared this in an e-mail he sent to the editor of the Museum Security Network, an organization that publishes information about stolen art.

Without telling Smith the e-mail would be published, Ton Cremers — the sole operator of Amsterdam-based Museum Security Network — made minor edits, then posted Smith’s e-mail to a list of about 1,000 museum directors, journalists, auction houses, gallery owners and Interpol and FBI agents.

Three months later, Batzel learned of the post. She contacted Cremers to deny both the stolen art and Nazi ancestry allegations. She also said Smith’s claims were motivated by financial disputes over contracting work.

… Batzel sued Smith, Cremers and the Museum Security Network for defamation and won. Cremers appealed.

And during the hearing over Cremers’ appeal, his appeal was upheld (in part), Batzel’s suit was denied, and webloggers gained protection from libel suits. While I’m certainly happy about the decision and its ramifications for weblogs, it’s a shame that it came at such a cost for Batzel.

(via Nyxnata)

Which way do you want to go? Up? Or down?

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Any ideas?

Eric’s put out a call for ideas for alternative formats that might both satisfy web usage habits and allow for a more temporally sensical page structure. I’m quite interested in seeing what, if anything, he comes up with, and finding out how workable any proposed solutions are (if at all).

However, I can’t really see merely swapping things around on the front page so that new posts show up at the bottom and scroll upwards, either. While it might make more chronological sense, the “most recent at the top” format is so ingrained in our heads that I think flipping the main page into true chronological order might be too confusing, disorienting, and generally more trouble than it’s worth.

I have to admit, I’m a bit lost on alternatives — in fact, the only viable alternative I can think of off the top of my head is adopting a single-post front page format (such as Marc Pilgrim uses, or as I do on WüdiVisions). My issues with this are simply that not all of my posts are long enough to give any “weight” to the front page, and when I post multiple times over the course of a day, any single post might have anywhere from a few hours to as little as a few minutes on the front page before it would disappear into the archives.

So what sort of solutions might there be out there? Right now, both my main page and my monthly archive pages are “backwards” — forwards by current web usage, but not chronologically. While I could fairly easily switch my archive pages around to display the beginning of the month at the top of the page and progress downwards (as Eric has done in his archives), that doesn’t necessarily work as well for the front page.

…our collective behavior when it comes to reading weblogs is a stunning example of an entire community adopting hugely counter-intuitive behaviors in order to conform to a received truth (that weblog entries should be ordered most to least recent). …if you read a twenty-chapter book the way you read weblogs, you’d start at the beginning of chapter 20, read it, skip back to the beginning of 19, read that, and so on until you finally worked your way back to chapter 1 and finished the book. How much sense does that make? Close to none.

I’ve noticed this myself from time to time, and admittedly, it can get quite frustrating. Not so much on normal day-to-day browsing if you’re able to keep track of any given site fairly frequently, but when playing the catch-up game after being out of the loop for a bit. Once you load a site, it’s not at all uncommon for people to refer back to previous posts, which you may have missed, so you have to backtrack to read them, then jump back to the current post…not that bad in the short-term, but aggravating after a while.

Here’s what I mean: the most-recent-first format is broken. No other form of written communication works that way, and in fact almost no form of human communication works like that. There’s a reason why. Reading a weblog is like watching Memento, which I agree was a cool movie, except all weblogs are like that so it’s as if every single movie released in the past seven or eight years was structured exactly like Memento. …If weblog entries were ordered like the weblogs themselves, this would be the next-to-last paragraph, and the one above would be below it instead.

Weblogs are “temporally broken”, according to Eric Meyer.

Okay, yes, I deliberately swapped the paragraph order around in the main part of the post. If you’d rather not try to run through the mental gymnastics of re-ordering the paragraphs, here’s the “correct” version. ;) Weblogs are “temporally broken”, according to Eric Meyer.

Here’s what I mean: the most-recent-first format is broken. No other form of written communication works that way, and in fact almost no form of human communication works like that. There’s a reason why. Reading a weblog is like watching Memento, which I agree was a cool movie, except all weblogs are like that so it’s as if every single movie released in the past seven or eight years was structured exactly like Memento. …If weblog entries were ordered like the weblogs themselves, this would be the next-to-last paragraph, and the one above would be below it instead.

I’ve noticed this myself from time to time, and admittedly, it can get quite frustrating. Not so much on normal day-to-day browsing if you’re able to keep track of any given site fairly frequently, but when playing the catch-up game after being out of the loop for a bit. Once you load a site, it’s not at all uncommon for people to refer back to previous posts, which you may have missed, so you have to backtrack to read them, then jump back to the current post…not that bad in the short-term, but aggravating after a while.

…our collective behavior when it comes to reading weblogs is a stunning example of an entire community adopting hugely counter-intuitive behaviors in order to conform to a received truth (that weblog entries should be ordered most to least recent). …if you read a twenty-chapter book the way you read weblogs, you’d start at the beginning of chapter 20, read it, skip back to the beginning of 19, read that, and so on until you finally worked your way back to chapter 1 and finished the book. How much sense does that make? Close to none.

So what sort of solutions might there be out there? Right now, both my main page and my monthly archive pages are “backwards” — forwards by current web usage, but not chronologically. While I could fairly easily switch my archive pages around to display the beginning of the month at the top of the page and progress downwards (as Eric has done in his archives), that doesn’t necessarily work as well for the front page.

I have to admit, I’m a bit lost on alternatives — in fact, the only viable alternative I can think of off the top of my head is adopting a single-post front page format (such as Marc Pilgrim uses, or as I do on WüdiVisions). My issues with this are simply that not all of my posts are long enough to give any “weight” to the front page, and when I post multiple times over the course of a day, any single post might have anywhere from a few hours to as little as a few minutes on the front page before it would disappear into the archives.

However, I can’t really see merely swapping things around on the front page so that new posts show up at the bottom and scroll upwards, either. While it might make more chronological sense, the “most recent at the top” format is so ingrained in our heads that I think flipping the main page into true chronological order might be too confusing, disorienting, and generally more trouble than it’s worth.

Eric’s put out a call for ideas for alternative formats that might both satisfy web usage habits and allow for a more temporally sensical page structure. I’m quite interested in seeing what, if anything, he comes up with, and finding out how workable any proposed solutions are (if at all).

Any ideas?

Adding to the TypeKey fray

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Okay, so while I wasn’t paying much attention, TypeKey became the most recent firestorm to sweep through the weblog world. By now, you probably already know at least the basics of TypeKey — and if not, then you’re not likely to be interested in the rest of this rambling (in brief, it’s an identity verification system for weblog commenting…think Microsoft Passport for weblogs).

There’s been a lot of interesting discussion of TypeKey since the first announcement. I haven’t been able to wade through all of it, but I’ve found Shelley Powers‘ three TypeKey-related posts (TypeKey: The Patriot Act of Weblogging, TypeKey Scavenger Hunt, TypeKey: Final Act), the related discussion in her comments, and the comments in response to Jeff Jarvis’ post Comment to be extremely worthwhile.

Looking over the TypeKey FAQ recently posted by SixApart, my first impression is that it sounds like a good system. Identity verification combined with comment moderation (to come in MovableType 3.0, and I’m assuming also in a future TypePad update) can go a long way to combatting both spam and unwanted comments. It likely won’t be a 100% solution — but then, chances are there just isn’t a 100% solution (there are always smarter mice to avoid the better mousetraps).

However, Shelley brings up two very important points (actually, she brings up a few more, but these two spoke more to me) — points that are prompting her to avoid TypeKey, neither implementing it on her weblog when it is released, nor signing into the service as an authenticated commenter. While I don’t feel as strongly about these as she does, they’re certainly worth considering.

The first is simply scalability and performance — if every comment on every weblog needs to go through some verification process before it appears on a post, how quickly will the system be able to respond as more and more people sign into the service?

We who went to Movable Type or other product that we host on our own servers did so specifically because we did NOT want to have any form of dependency on a centralized system. We did so, for the most part, because we have been burned on either performance or access because of the centralization and scaling problems.

…[Mark Pilgrim] lists several centralized systems that he believes do scale well and serve the community, and it’s true these have managed to scale and are useful, but each and every one has failed when I’ve tried to access it at least once a week.

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

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

Unfortunately, at this point, there’s really no way of knowing how Six Apart plans on handling this. TypeKey’s announcement is only a few days old, and details of the underlying systems (both software and hardware) are still forthcoming. Until TypeKey moves out of the testing stage, goes live, and starts getting hammered by everyone who signs on, we won’t know the impact that the system might or might not have on our sites.

Historically speaking, as Shelley points out, things aren’t looking too rosy. I’d like to think that Six Apart realizes this, and will have done everything possible to ensure that these issues aren’t a major factor — but then, there’s a lot of things that I’d like to think that aren’t borne out by real-world evidence. At the moment, “wait and see” is the only real approach we can take.

The second issue that caught my interest was one of conversations, who we allow to participate in them, and what we allow them to say.

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

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

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

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

So far, I’ve kept a very open comment policy on my weblog. Generally, outside of removing comment spam and deleting duplicate comments, I do very little editing of what people contribute to my site. That’s not to say that I’m not tempted at times — I have one particular post that has picked up some extremely disturbing racist comments — but to date, the only major comment deletion or editing I’ve done has been at the request of the person who left the comments (and that was under admittedly unusual circumstances).

Truth to tell, I’ve never entirely understood the impulse to delete comments that don’t agree with something I’ve posted. I’ve had some very interesting discussions with people who didn’t agree with something I’ve written — if part of why we bother to blog is to invite discussion, why would we want to limit that discussion to the proverbial “echo chamber” of nodding sycophants? Seems to me that that approach makes for some dreadfully boring “discussions”.

At other times, I’ve seen people get very aggravated about a comment that seemed to be overly rude, aggressive, impolite, or offensive in some way. Well, perhaps…but while it would be nice if all debate could be structured perfectly politely, is the occasional jibe, jab, or verbal tweak really worth deleting the comment (or even banning the commenter) and in the process removing the actual content of what was said? Myself, I certainly don’t think so — in fact, I often get a certain perverse pleasure out of responding to those posts. While I’ve never quite mastered the stereotypical British practice of being able to say the most brutally vicious things in an impeccably polite manner, I’m always willing to give it a shot. ;)

So, with all of that…will TypeKey work for me (if and when it is integrated into TypePad)? Well, at the moment, keeping an open comment system has been working fairly well — the comment spam hasn’t been hitting me hard enough to make it terribly difficult to deal with, and I do enjoy getting feedback when someone feels moved to comment. I’m also not a big fan of comment moderation — as it would require me to approve every comment before it appeared on the site, it could lead to some oddly dis-linear conversations as I’m not at my keyboard at all times, anxiously awaiting the next comment to land in my inbox.

At the moment, it looks like TypeKey-enabled weblogs will have a few options for how they handle comments.

  1. Only accept TypeKey-authenticated comments where the commenter sends an email address
  2. Only accept TypeKey-authenticated comments
  3. Accept TypeKey-authenticated and moderated comments
  4. Accept TypeKey-authenticated and regular comments
  5. Accept moderated comments
  6. Accept unmoderated comments
  7. Accept anonymous comments

My current plan is to go for option four. Those people who sign up for TypeKey will be able to use their TypeKey logon to verify their identity. Those people who don’t use TypeKey will still be able to participate normally. Ideally, I’d like to find a way to signify TypeKey validated commenters (possibly with a special icon by their name) — I’ll have to look into the viability of doing that once TypeKey is available to me.

Given that option four will perform essentially identically to my current open, unmoderated system, why bother? Well — first off, curiosity. I’d like to be able to play with the TypeKey system from both a commenting and administration standpoint, and this will allow me to do so. Secondly, it will allow those people who do use TypeKey to use that logon to comment on my site along with any other TypeKey-enabled sites they visit, without having to remember separate information for my specific weblog (sure, it’s easy enough to do, we probably all have a good number of username/password combinations rattling around in our heads…but why not make it that much easier to keep track of them all?). And lastly, should I get to the point where I feel the need to institute a more draconian comment policy (though I hope that doesn’t happen), having TypeKey already enabled will make it that much easier.

In the end, then, the questions and concerns that Shelley has raised are very worth keeping in mind, but they’re not enough to keep me away from TypeKey, as I think that there could be some very good benefits to the system. Here’s hoping that once TypeKey goes live it’s the benefits that play out under real-world conditions, and not the potential downsides.

iTunes: “On the Run (Hot Tracks)” by Bigod 20 from the album Roadkill 1.04 (1992, 6:21).

Marriage by the Book, part 2

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Something I pointed out last August seems to be making the rounds again, and now I’m a bit curious as to the original source. It’s a collection of proposed laws for governing marriage, based on Biblical quotations (in response to the many people basing their anti-gay-marriage stance on select Biblical verses, instead of just admitting to homophobia and bigotry).

Here’s what I know of this piece of writing, working backwards.

Today — March 21st, 2004 — Boing Boing posted about it, linking to The Common Good Network, who posted their version on February 4th, 2004.

The Common Good Network gave attribution to The Boston Phoenix, who published a more Massacheussets-specific version of the text between Nov. 28th and Dec. 4th, 2003 under the byline of Mary-Ann Greanier.

However, searching through my archives, I linked to and quoted nearly the identical text on August 26th, 2003, after discovering it through the Ex-Gay Watch via a link from Anil Dash, and linked to the original version (to my knowledge) on Public Nuisance from August 18th, 2003.

While I’m sure that Alex Frantz of Public Nuisance is flattered that his creation is still making the rounds, shouldn’t credit be given where credit is due?