adamyntium

Category: blogging

  • Why I’ll no longer read your no-comment blog

    Earlier this evening, I followed a link from Techmeme and encountered an editorial that was, well, IMHO just flat out wrong.  Inaccurate, illogical, the whole nine yards.

    As I was reading it, I considered adding a comment to provide corrections and contrasting opinions, but then reconsidered, since it’s just not worth my effort to crime-fight every time someone is wrong on the Internet.  Furthermore, as I realized just moments later, I couldn’t have sounded off on the piece even if I wanted to… since this author had decided not to accept comments for posting.

    First, let me acknowledge up front this is absolutely within this blogger’s rights.  And surely there are a number of understandable reasons they might have made such a choice:

    • It can get tiring cleaning up comment spam.
    • Commenters can be annoying, poorly behaved, and sometimes downright abusive, and dealing with these jerks is even less fun than dealing with spammers.
    • Welcoming input from users (even the “good” ones) essentially results in the creation of an (oft-time-consuming) obligation to engage with the community of commenters, or risk being branded aloof, detached, etc.
    However, there’s a much less, well, neutral reason to have commenting disabled:  you can spout misleading nonsense and not get called out on it on your blog.
    I no longer care whether a blogger’s reasons for excluding comments on their blog are innocent or out of an intent to deceive.  I’ve decided I’m no longer going to read no-comment blogs for the following reasons:


    1) I enjoy supporting bloggers who respect and yearn to learn from their readers.
    A great example is Fred Wilson, whose blog entries routinely get huge masses of comments… the vast majority of which range from interesting to hugely insightful.  And that’s no accident; he leads by example, consistently posting respectful and thoughtful entries.
     
    2) On many blogs, I find that the comments make me smarter (and also introduce me to smart people worth following).
    Sure, the comment sections of some blogs are cesspools, and I’m pushing myself to avoid such blogs as well.  But even when a blog has a mix of quality and not-so-quality comments, I’ll quite commonly find gems of interesting (or at least smartly entertaining) comments and commenters.
     
    3) I’ve found the writing in popular comment-free blogs more likely to infuriate me than that in the comment-containing blogs*.
    Let me reiterate both the personal nature of this observation and non-black-and-whiteness of the above statement.  I’m not saying that all blogs without comments are “bad,” nor am I saying that all blogs with comments are “good.”  Rather, I have just more often found myself annoyed and frustrated when reading no-comment blogs than I have with blogs supporting public commenting.  And life is too short to spend time doing unnecessary things that infuriate.
    *  *  *
    What are your thoughts on this?  Have you developed a similar preference for blogs-with-comments, or are you just as (or even more) happy reading blogs uncluttered by the blatherings of the masses?

  • How employment at prominent tech firms stymies open communication

    Let me first get the disclaimers out of the way:

    • I have worked at Google since March, 2006.
    • I do not speak on behalf of Google in this blog, nor do my views necessarily dovetail with those of other Googlers; I’ve historically held more of a public-facing role than most Googlers, so I have heightened sensitivities.
    • I believe prominent technology firms — certainly including Google — contribute many things to the world that improve communications and societal openness.
    *  *  *

    Do people who work at Google / Yahoo / Microsoft / Facebook resent the fact that they can’t genuinely speak up on the Internet and have to do so anonymously, in most cases?

    This really hit home for me, and I decided that I’d outline the many ways in which I (and presumably many others) are forbidden from communicating in some ways and — more commonly — feel uncomfortable expressing ourselves in specific ways or on a variety of topics.
    Stuff I am not allowed to discuss…
    This is perhaps the most obvious category, the list of what employees like me are typically forbidden from communicating. 
    • Confidential information on products and services my company is working on.
      And this isn’t just due to obvious competitive-market issues, but also for reasons of strategic public communications.  Due to events in the news, something we’re working on (and have been working on for well before these events transpired) might be seen as insensitive or inappropriate… and we know that after things die down a bit, the public will embrace rather than resent this new product or service.  Other considerations:  we might want to release with a bigger splash, we’re required to be silent due to third-party agreements (hardware partners, etc.), we don’t want a ton of public pontificating based upon a very rough alpha, and so on.
    • Issues my company is currently involved with in a legal context or is likely to become involved with in the future
      For Googlers, this means no comments about “search neutrality,” or intellectual property issues with regards to YouTube, and so on.
    • Private user information we’re entrusted with
      Such information is quite stringently controlled at my company (and I’d presume at other companies as well), but aside from the technical and legal (not to mention ethical!) safeguards, I think all of us know that it’d be long-term career suicide to even be perceived as engaging in untoward behavior in this area.  
    Topics that I’m allowed to discuss, but could result (or have resulted) in unpleasant situations
    • Competitors’ products and services
      If I suggest a limitation of iPhones, for instance, I may be accused of being brainwashed by my company (which works on the Android operating system)… or, at minimum, I may simply worry that I’ll be perceived in negative ways (catty, manipulative, etc.).  On the flip side, if I profess love for a competitor’s product, it’s a pretty sure bet someone will retort, “See?  Even Googlers avoid [Google’s product in this space]!” which can then, I kidd you not, snowball into headlines like, “Googlers snub [Google productname] in favor of [non-Google productname].”  Aside from the ridiculous assumption that because I am not using and enjoying both products, there’s the equally-stupid one outspoken Googler = all Googlers.
    • Hot button societal issues that my company is associated with.
      Like Privacy. Net neutrality.  Not only are there often legal circumstances surrounding these issues which make talking about them verboten anyway, it’d be just a minefield to jump into online or offline conversations on such heated topics.  I could be mistaken for someone speaking on behalf of the company (especially since I’ve appeared in Google-official videos about Privacy in the past), or simply harangued as a Google shill.
    • Frustration over my own company’s products
      As much as I love a lot of the stuff that comes out of my company, there are also products and services we provide that, well, I don’t really like or I like but am dying to see improved.  But what could I possibly gain by criticizing them in public?
      • If I feel that the only way to see changes I’m hoping for internally is to apply external pressure, then it’s probably time for me to consider changing employers.
      • If I don’t think many people will even notice my criticisms, why am I even bothering to express them?  Even if just one person sees it — someone who works on that product — I’ve at minimum made someone really sad, and probably just burned a bridge.  Who knows?  That person might be a future teammate, and — depending on the fierceness of my criticisms — that relationship could be mighty uncomfortable!
    And, as someone who may again in the future speak on behalf of my company to the press or at conferences:
    • Controversial views (e.g., anything on religion, politics, sexuality…)
      By articulating such views, especially if forcefully, I could negatively affect the comfort of interactions with or even treatment from journalists, conference attendees, bloggers, etc.
    • Specific blogs, media outlets, bloggers, journalists, etc.
      Whether it’s highlighting certain outlets’ lack of ethics or professionalism, or schaudenfreudically giggling over sophomoric online slugfests, it’d be all fun and games until I was asked to interview with one of these news networks / blogs / newspapers.
    *  *  *
    So what’s the loss here for you and society?
    • You get a less nuanced, less comprehensive view of how and what specific people think.
    • You get less information and fewer (potential useful) opinions from specific people than you otherwise would.  On a related note, more misinformation on the internet remains uncorrected.  In some cases (e.g., minor misconception of a product’s specs), the damage is pretty insignificant.  In other cases, the misinformation is pretty harmful, causing users to do unnecessary work or politicians to make unnecessary or even harmful laws.
    • Causes (political, societal) which could use the open support will often not receive it.
    But we can’t blame Corporate Communications policies
    At least at Google there’s no required pre-screening of our external communications.  We have a pleasantly enlightened group of Corporate Communications folks; they get social media, and they have never to my knowledge discouraged us from blogging, tweeting, etc.  The vast majority of the speech-limits I’ve described above are self-imposed, and certainly cannot be blamed on company policies.
    Anonymity?
    Sure, I and others could write under nom de plumes, though of course we’d still be forbidden from disclosing company secrets and the like.  But in addition to running the risk of being uncovered, I feel that this’d be a slippery slope emotionally; if I started criticizing or defending Google products as someone other than myself, I’d probably feel sucked in to the ensuing debates, and I’d become more and more uncomfortable “living a lie” so to speak.  So, at least for me, writing under something that’s not my real name or dominant internet nickname (“ThatAdamGuy”) isn’t a good choice.
    And on the whole, these big companies are still a net gain for societal communication and openness
    Look at the information shared around the world with Twitter, or YouTube or spread through large networks of friends (and often then ultimately the world) via Facebook.  I may feel occasionally muzzled and frustratingly so, but in the grand scheme of things, I remain convinced it’s for the greater good.

  • Is it wise spending our time writing for *other* sites?

    I’ve been contributing to the Q&A site Quora a lot lately, and it’s pretty neat. I’ve posed questions, answered questions, edited stuff, voted on a lot of answers, and so on.  And in a broader sense, like many of us, I’ve also spent probably hundreds of hours in the aggregate answering questions on Aardvark, posting often rather detailed comments on others’ blogs, giving detailed assistance in various topical forums, writing reviews on Amazon and Hotpot, and so on.  And this got me to thinking…

    How does all this compare with the volume of commentary and information I’ve contributed to my own web sites, including this blog and www.adamlasnik.net?  Ack! Let’s just say that the imbalance is at least initially rather shocking and depressing.

    Nearly all of my words… shared not in my cyberhome, but everywhere else?!  At the end of the day, what do I have to show for this, other than a widely scattered smattering of AdamBits here and there, just blips on the planets of giants and potentially-future-giants?

    Yet… all of those other sites clearly offer a lot of value, or I and millions of others wouldn’t be spending so much time, contributing so much of our knowledge and so many of our (hopefully useful) opinions to them, right?  Indeed.  Among other benefits, we get…

    • Recs:  Oft-improved (personalized) recommendations based upon our input
    • Visibility:  Seen by interesting / important / attractive people who might be impressed by our brilliant commentary :p
      • …and, more seriously, seen a lot more people than when we post on our own, much less popular blogs
      • …and from the exposure, sometimes extra contract work or even full-time job offers
    • More time to write:  Freed from having to maintain / structure / security-update our own self-hosted site
    • Less friction:  The opportunity to offer contributions in handy little bite-sized chunks (whereas writing even a single blog post can be hard work and take a long time!)
    • Good karma:  A happy feeling from widely sharing our knowledge and opinions with others who are likely to be specifically interested in such topics.  My post reviewing a specific Zürich hotel on my own web site?  Maybe 25 people have seen it.  Had I posted the same review on TripAdvisor, for instance, I bet it would have gotten at least 10-20x the views (and thus helped more people).
    In a nutshell, contributing our thoughts on someone else’s site is easy, painless, and often philanthropic in a way.

    —

    So what are we giving up by posting elsewhere instead of aggregating our expertise on our own sites? (for the sake of argument, I’m assuming it’s too cumbersome to successfully do both)

    • Ad revenue.
    • Stats/analytics:  More detailed insights into the popularity of our writings.
    • Longevity of our expressions.  What happens if and when Quora goes away, for instance?  Sure, if they’re nice, they’ll enable us to export our contributions ahead of time, but that data set’ll be largely out of context and frankly not all that usable anymore.  In contrast, by forcing ourselves to write coherent, standalone blog posts, we are the ones in control over our words.  Even if Blogger were to go kaput, I could pretty easily export my posts in advance, and they’d be just as valuable posted on another service.  Even service closures aside, on a well-organized site a piece of expression can remain visible and useful for visitors, whereas a post on Twitter or Facebook, for instance, has a half-life of, hmm, maybe three days?
    • Focus.  When we contribute our thoughts on other sites, we’re more typically reactive… responding to others’ questions, replying on an existing forum thread, etc.  If one were to somehow magically compile all of one’s contributions across the web into a big blog, it’d look like… ugh… long-form twitter! :p.  And while blogs (yes, like mine here) can also be all over the place topically, there are also numerous options for creating a thematic blog or site which can ideally be structured and coherent as a whole.
    • Centralized identity.  There’s something positive to be said about having a single “YouHome” where you can direct prospective employers, new friends, buddies you meet at hostels, etc.  Then again, there’s admittedly also a downside to having a conveniently single place where prospective employers, new friends, and so on can GoogleStalk you.
    But oh, the hurdle of creating a self-centralized home of expression!  Before embarking on a blog post, I typically torture myself with the questions: “Is this idea compelling enough?  Do I have time to write it?  Will it fit okay with the recent entries or will I look like a [insert negative descriptor here]?”  For each addition to my web site, there’s the issue of actually creating the .htm page, crafting a title, a meta-description, updating any relevant table-of-contents or side-bar navigation, etc. (I could use a hosted CMS like Google Sites and avoid all the aforementioned process hassles but would have significantly less control over my site, not be able to use javascript on my pages, etc.).
    —
    So obviously there’s no right answer here.  But at minimum, we should be contributing to the great interwebs with awareness… at least cognizant of the benefits and disadvantages inherent in either building up someone else’s business with our words or “hoarding” our words in a cyberplace we own.
    What do you think?  Are you concerned about the tradeoffs described above?  Have I overlooked any pluses or minuses associated with contributing knowledge other other sites vs. one’s own?

  • Dear techosphere — my wishes for 2011

    Hi techosphere!

    I realize I don’t have much right to demand stuff from you.  I’ve been a lackluster blogger lately, and as someone who sold his soul to a big evil Don’t Be Evil corporation, I can’t claim to understand the grinding challenges of running a profitable and popular tech blog.  But that’s not going to stop me from asking, nay, begging you to do a better job in 2011.

    • Focus on thoughtful coverage rather than fast coverage.
      Yes, yes, I know you covered the leaked whatsit 42 seconds faster than OtherTechBlog.  I know you think the world is just pee-in-their-pants excited to read live-blogging revelations like, “Oh wait!  He’s now walking up to the stage…”  And even if this admittedly (and sadly) gets you a big traffic boost for the moment, no one is going to give a flying patootie about this shallow commentary two days later.  Substantive, thoughtful reporting will garner you far more long-time traffic and loyalty.
    • This ain’t the Killing Fields.  Cut out the “killing” crap, won’t you?
      With few exceptions, the “winner-take-all” mentality is both stupid and false.
    • Every time you blather that “[x] is the new [y],” a dog kills a kitten.
      ’nuff said.
    • Quit it with the “Ex-Googler” and “Former Facebooker” headlines, please
      Former employment at these firms pretty much means diddly-squat as a predictor of future entrepreneurial success. I’ve seen innumerable admirable successes and embarrassing flops from former Googlers/Facebookers, and probably around the same ratio of wins/failures as from other geeks.  Yeah, I guess, “Well-respected engineer experienced in [x & y]” makes for a longer and less-compelling lede, but still…
    • Monitor your comments and/or use a comments system that allows trusted users to flag spam/spammers!
      HINT:  When you have the same asshole successfully comment-spamming exactly the same URL for months, you’re pissing off your readers and you have a problem.  Get a better commenting system, hire an intern to moderate spam and ban spammers, or both.
    • Avoid the pile-on (or, just because it’s all the rage on Twitter doesn’t make it news)
      Sure, it feels good to kick the big guys when they’re down, but it’s uninformative and lame and a waste of your time and your readers’ time.  Ask yourself:  was there really substantial harm, and in particular, harm that hasn’t already been identified 42,000 times by others online?  Are you offering insight, or are you merely channeling the journalistic “skills” of Geraldo Rivera?
    • Engage thoughtfully with your readers, and give love to those who contribute value to your blog
      I have to call out LifeHacker specifically as a blog that does a great job with this.  I regularly see the authors thoughtfully and substantively engage with their readers in the comments, clarifying points, apologizing for mistakes, and so on.  This starkly contrasts with authors’ absence or hubris and snarkiness I see displayed on at least one other prominent tech blog.
    • Be respectful of other people and other companies by refusing trade traffic for integrity
      I don’t hold out much hope on this one, but it has to be said:  When you publish an internal, confidential document, you’re a amoral jerk (unless by doing so you’re exposing a ring of child traffickers or a dastardly plot to poison the water supply of New York, etc. etc.).  You and your readers typically gain nothing but schaudenfreudic glee or lookie-loo gratification, while threatening the safety, security, and/or morale of those associated with that document.  What are you hoping to accomplish, aside from boosting your blog’s popularity?  In the end, you — yes, you! — cause companies to be less open with their employees (communicating with less internal breadth, frequency and transparency), and so little by little you are harming corporate culture and negatively affecting the happiness and productivity of tens of thousands of workers… the same workers who produce the cool stuff you make a living writing about. Ain’t that counterproductive in the long run?

      Similarly, when you publish photos of an unreleased product, you’re hurting the morale of people working their ass off on that product, potentially damaging the competitiveness of that product and company, and generally being a douchebag for desperately prioritizing page views over Doing the Right Thing.  Not only that, but 8 times out of 10, you’ve got it wrong.  Sheesh.

    —
    Gah, in re-reading this, I seem especially negative, particularly on New Year’s Day.  Sorry about that :\.  But something’s gotta change… not only in how bloggers cover the world, but in how we readers consume information and support blogs.  From 2011 forward, I pledge to spend more time rewarding those blogs and bloggers who blog responsibly and thoughtfully with my pageviews and comments and links.  I hope you will do the same.
    In the meantime, help redeem this entry 🙂  Why not highlight some tech-oriented bloggers below that serve as good examples?  I’d love to shake up my Reader subscriptions a bit!

  • ExpressionEngine to Blogger — My blog reborn

    Well, that was a pain in the gluteus maximus! I’ve spent a total of over 20 hours (!) setting up a Blogger blog and moving all of my blog entries and comments over from my old blog home powered by ExpressionEngine.  I think I have pretty much everything transferred successfully now, but I’m counting on you, fine readers, to set me straight (in the comments) if I’m mistaken :-).

    Why did I do this?
    I felt I was spending too much time on technical issues and not enough time on, well, actually writing posts and replying to your comments.  The key factors in my decision to change blogging platforms were these two:
    – Frustration with my blogging software (ExpressionEngine)
    – Annoyance with my web host, and dealing with web hosting in general

    ExpressionEngine

    • Probably stemming from some file/template/database corruption somewhere down the line, I ended up having to spend 5+ hours troubleshooting each time I did even minor software upgrades.  EE staffers were always helpful and kind in working with me, but still… 🙁
    • I never was able to find a way to add WYSIWIG post editing (yeah, yeah, I know… you’re gonna make me surrender my geek badge, but hey, it often makes drafting posts easier/faster!). 
    • I never became comfortable with the control panel / dashboard of EE, and sadly I did not feel their new 2.0 was an improvement.  I found the dashboard to be unintuitive, often requiring an enormous number of clicks just to do basic (and oft-needed) things… stuff was never where I expected or thought it should be, and so on.
    • It became increasingly clear that EE was way overkill for what I wanted to do.  Enormously powerful but massively complex, I often had to spend a ton of time to figure out how to do even simple things with my blog.

    Web hosting

    • I had high hopes for NearlyFreeSpeech, but I’ve been disappointed.  I’ve experienced downtime, had my sites move to a new server (with no silent and persistent redirection on the part of the host), and surprisingly found the service not nearly as cheap as I thought I’d be.  I think the kicker was when I learned that they discourage users from serving gzip-compressed html pages to save load on their servers.  Uncool 🙁
    • And in general, having to host one’s own site is just a pain.  Yeah, yeah, I’m gonna miss a lot of things, including the ability to tweak, tune, customize, etc.  But I’m looking forward to never again wondering whether my site’s down because their mySQL server died, apache choked, I forgot to pay my bill, etc. 

    Why Blogger and not, say, WordPress?
    Because I want to spend time writing rather than learning php, patching my software or plugins to protect against yet another vulnerability, dealing with a web host, and so on.  WordPress is truly an awesome, amazing piece of software… even moreso, considering that it’s free.  But after spending a zillion hours tinkering with and cursing at Radio Userland, Movable Type, and ExpressionEngine, I’m looking forward to now shacking up with the not-so-powerful-but-generally-reliable partner of Blogger.

    How did I move everything over?
    Very carefully, and with great, great pain.  Here were the steps involved, as best as I can remember:

    • Figured out how to export my entries and comments from ExpressionEngine.
      • My web host choked when I tried to export everything at once, so I did this in three batches, thus creating three export files.
    • Copied relevant images and other files from my web host’s server to my hard drive via FTP.
    • Created an appengine account, created a Google Apps account, and then, using both of these products, somehow mapped a subdomain of mine to my app.
    • Found a way to use appengine as a web host.  Apologies; I’m too lazy to find the info now, but hopefully lazyweb will help me and then I can link to it :). 
    • Downloaded python to my Windows desktop, plus the Google App Engine launcher.
    • Created a directory on my hard drive to store the images and other blog files referred to in my blog posts, and then uploaded them to my appengine account using the Google App Engine Launcher
      • And if anyone can tell me how I can deploy these files without having to enter in my Google Account credentials every time, I’d appreciate it 🙂
    • Back to the exported entry+comment files:  edited a ton of domain references, including pointers to images that I had uploaded using the EE software.
    • Tried various Windows Grep programs to make batch changes to URLs in the export files, remove a lot of extra line-feeds from those same files, change emoticon smilies to text smilies, and a lot more.  I ended up paying $30 for Multiple File Search and Replace, which frankly isn’t all that great usability-wise, but it seemed to be the best of the lot. 
      • On a related note, I learned (of course, the hard way) that Blogger silently discards any comment that has an img tag.  More specifically, it throws away comments that have any tags other than the following: A, B, BR, I, EM, and STRONG
    • Armed with seemingly ready export files, I then had to convert these exports from MT (MovableType) format into a format suitable for Blogger importing, so I used the handy online MovableType to Blogger app.
    • I then opened up a test blog to test the importing of the files.
      • This is important, because once you import and publish the entries, those URLs cannot be reused on that blog, so if your first import isn’t perfect and you do a batch delete and re-import, you’ll end up with even yuckier-than-usual Blogger URLs :-(.
    • After doing some more adjustments via the steps above (e.g., more grepping to fix stuff), I then created my actual blog (this one) and mapped it to a subdomain.
      • Picked a template, customized it a bit, added some widgets, etc.
    • Then… import time!  Only to find — ack!  About half of my entries were imported with crappy line spacing.  So I spent literally hours going through and editing entries to fix egregiously bad (read: extra extra extra br’s) line spacing.  In retrospect, I don’t think better pre-processing of the export files could have prevented this.  Too many variables (amongst body formatting, comment formatting, etc.)
    • Once I was reasonably sure that I was ready to move things over, it was time to have fun making 301 redirects from my old blog pages to my new blog pages!
      • I couldn’t find any way to query Blogger for a time-ordered list of entry URLs, so I used Xenu’s Link Sleuth.  Unfortunately, that didn’t get me an actual time-ordered list, either, and I ended up having to spend a couple of hours correlating bladam.com URLs with grouped-by-month blogger URLs using an excel spreadsheet. (I was pretty easily able to get a list of URLs from ExpressionEngine to begin with by playing with existing templates).
      • I made sure to create sets of redirects for entries, months, and categories, including fixing old redirects from my last domain change, and then created separate .htaccesses per directory on my old server with these redirects in them.
    • Dissatisfied with Blogger comments, I decided to implement commenting on this blog with Disqus.  But for more than a day, Disqus barfed up an error message whenenver I tried to import my Blogger comments into my Disqus account; luckily, Disqus apparently took some pepto-bismol this morning and the comments imported just fine this morning.
      • Note that replacing Blogger comments with Disqus commenting may or may not have SEO ramifications, depending upon whom you believe.  With no insider knowledge whatsoever — just my own playing around and testing — I have a sense that Disqus is not a happy thing for SEO, but in this case I just didn’t care enough; I’d rather have fewer, happier readers and fewer comment-moderation headaches.

    Whew!  I think that accounts for much of the process, though I’ve probably forgotten some of the zillions of steps involved in the transfer.  I also omitted the swearing parts.

    What am I sorely missing from ExpressionEngine?
    A lot!  Including…

    • The ability to choose my own URL format for entries (rather than the ugly date format Blogger insists upon).
    • The option to choose my own per-post URLs, for more memorable and scannable URLs to show up in search results and so on.
    • Super-powerful templating in which it’s possible to have almost any view for anything (tag lists, archives, etc.). 
    • A lot of power-user stuff in general… the ability to set meta-descriptions, to futz with html title formats, to have a fav icon, and — most importantly — the ability to have a custom 404 page!

    What is frustrating me about Blogger?

    • A lof the defaults just seem ill-thought-out and often not even changeable unless you muck about in the template HTML, which is what I was aiming to avoid by coming to Blogger in the first place.  For instance, you can’t change the size, the positioning, or pretty much anything about the template attribution :-(. 
    • And, at least in this template, there are scary-awful padding and other css defaults that are a pain to override.  For example, every image is css’ingly placed into this hellish drop-image thing that looks out of place within the already-sorta-drop-shadowed content panels.  Okay for photos, but for every other image (e.g., icons)… ouch!
    • Some things that I’d think should be really basic are just seemingly crazy-hard to accomplish.  For instance, I wanted to include a little blip of text in my sidebar which mentions how many posts and comments my blog has currently.  Simple, right?  Nope.  Despite Googling for this and trying a few suggestions, I’ve not found anything that works.
    • No templates featuring 2 or 3-column fluid layout?  Aw 🙁
    • Inline css, and lots of it, on every page?  Why on earth doesn’t Blogger call a (user-editable) external stylesheet? 😮  In general, reading through the source of Blogger-created makes me want to run and hide.

    What do I like about Blogger?

    • I like having a WYSIWIG editor (though I realize this might be partly to blame for the HTML output). It’s nice to be able indent and exdent in bulleted lists without having to worry about nested ul and li tags and such.  In fact, the editor is pretty handy in general, letting you quickly add labels, move images around, backdate or postdate posts, and so on.
    • The template editor has some neat functionality.  I like how I can change colors and fonts and such with just a few clicks and instantly see these changes reflected in my blog.
    • I don’t have to worry about my data.  While uptime isn’t perfect, I’m rather darn sure that Google isn’t going to lose my posts 🙂
    • It’s free 🙂

    Philosophical considerations
    So I’ve spent way too much of a couple of weekends doing this blog transfer thing.  And for what?  I’m still not sure.  Looking through my bladam analytics, it’s pretty clear that:

    • I don’t have a ton of visitors, typically around 250 a day.
    • And most of those are reading just a handful of entries (often the, ahem, ones with titilating keywords; boy, must those folks be disappointed!)
    • Looking back over a lot of my older entries, they’re either stale, boring, embarrassing, or a combination of those attributes.  Do I even want that stuff still on the net?!
    • Shouldn’t I be spending time outside?  With friends?  Or making new stuff (music compositions, for instance)?

    But what’s done is done, and thank jeebus, it looks like the bulk of bladam (excepting subsequent tweaking) is now done and ready for new blog posts.  That, of course, raises many of the same questions:  is it true that those who can’t do, write?  Or is the act of writing (and the hopeful pleasure and utility others derive from such writing) a substantive enough asset in itself?  That, my friends, is perhaps fodder for another post.  For now, I think I’m going to finally peel myself away from this computer and heave a few very big sighs of relief.

    *  *  *

    Anyway, thanks for reading my first post on bladam-on-Blogger, and I hope you like my new blog’s home and (eventual) design and new content :-).

  • I, Robot

    Hello.  Good day.  A little quiet?
    I’m feeling a little blue myself.
    You know, A little anxious for no particular reason
    A little sad that I should feel anxious at this age.
    You know, a little self-conscious anxiety resulting in non-specific sadness.
    The state that I call blue.

    – spoken by the narrator (“Man In Chair”) in the awesome musical “The Drowsy Chaperone”

    Today I am a little sad because of a small heartbreak.
    And a little anxious because, well, I should not be admitting this in public.

    Real men don’t do cry.  But real businessmen… the type who are strong, who manage or mentor, who think of respect and solidness and promotions… they are not bloviatingly blathering on a blog, blissfully or blamefully or otherwise.

    Think.  Think of someone you look up to at work.  Do you want to know his private foibles, hear of his personal struggles?  Really?  No. You want someone to look up to.  Someone at least a little bit larger than life.  A rock, or minimally a damn large stone.

    You have your own problems, and when you want to schadenfreudically delight in someone else’s problems, you have your TV or paper or favorite internet gossip sites within an arm or eyeball’s reach.

    When your current or future dear leaders are feeling blue, they ideally do not show you, much less tell you.

    Then again, maybe it’s different today.  Maybe the Live Journalers of the modern era will grow up to be respected leaders… warty angst, noserings and all.  Perhaps someday we’ll view an executive’s late night facebookings with indifference rather than annoyance or scorn.

    Or maybe not.  Maybe he or she will methodically scrub, hoping the last trace of emotion is gone.  Here, look, a résumé.  A fine, level-headed portfolio indeed!

    And only a strong, competitive, safe, and secure heart.

  • Bureaucratic snafu snags Catholic Priest and leaves me wondering: what’s my role?

    A friend of mine just let me know of a frustrating and seemingly unfair issue in his neck of the woods:  A popular and much-loved priest in South Dakota is apparently about to be deported due to what seems to be a pretty lame bureaucratic snafu (pemanent residency application accepted but later lost/misplaced).  An advocacy site is here: HelpFather.

    But nothing is quite as simple or as black-and-white as it seems, of course, at least in my mind 🙂

    Here are reasons why I was tempted not to post this on my blog:
    – I’m agnostic, and am not a fan of Catholic doctrine / influence / etc.
    – This matter’s already gotten press.  What more could my humble blog do?
    – Speaking of my humble blog, and selfishly for a moment, would my readers really care about this somewhat-local-oriented issue at all?
    – This guy’s a priest.  Can’t he just pray for this to get fixed?  If that’s ineffective, maybe it’s God’s will for him to return to Ireland?
    – There are always at least two sides to every issue.  Can we trust that the folks advocating on behalf of this priest are telling the whole story?

    And reasons why I ultimately posted this:
    – A favor to my friend 🙂
    – Someone’s gotta help the little guy.  And this one seems like a nice fella, mired in an uncaring and often-crappy bureaucracy.
    – I do have some power as a blogger.  Perhaps by helping get this guy’s predicament known outside of South Dakota I—and my readers—could make a difference.
    – Sometimes it’s the little things in life that matter.  Is this guy really important in the grand scheme of things?  Maybe not.  But he means a lot to my friend and my friend’s family.  Lots of small things, “small people”… they all add up, all contribute to the richness of communities, to our planet.
    – And, let’s be honest here… I bet people are more interested in this story than in my swinger blatherings, no? 😛 (hmm… I’m combining a priest-related posting with a swinger reference; it’s a good thing I am agnostic, or I’d be going to hell :D).

    *  *  *

    What about you?

    What do you think of this priest’s situation? Of me posting this on my blog?

  • I hesitate to read your opinions when I can’t talk back

    Please forgive the unsexy title. I know it would have been far more Diggable if I had titled it “Top 10 Reasons Why Your Opinion Blog Needs Comments.”

    Anyway… I can sometimes enjoy link blogs (“101 uses for a paper mache African swallow. No, European!”) without comments. Or info-blogs (new product released, site will be down next Tuesday, check out these new features).

    But blogs in which the AUTHOR is mostly discussing his or her opinions about stuff, or blogs that cover controversial stuff (news stories, culture, etc.)… damn, those better have comments enabled, or they won’t get my eyeballs for long.

    For instance, I’m looking at you, BoingBoing.  Aside from the fact that I have (somewhat) of a life that precludes reading a bazillion entries a day that are talking at me, not with me… when it’s uber-oh-so-important-or-popular sites, I’ll be bound to find the same links in my friends’ blogs anyway.

    Yes, I know, comment and trackback spammers are a bitch.  I hope their nether-regions suffer from this and/or they are forced to be locked in a closet with Vanna White night after night after night after night.  But with good software, good plugins (YAY, Akismet!), and a little elbow grease, these cretins are substantially less of a problem.

    I have mixed feelings when it comes to comments on corporate blogs.

    Positives:

    • Bullshit can be called out or, on a less severe note, readers can offer corrections, add useful contextual info, etc. (hopefully resulting in better blog entries in the future and more informed readers)
    • Readers can request for clarifications or additional info from the company.  But see the flipside of this below.
    • Occasional registration requirements aside, commenting has a comparatively low barrier to entry, meaning that quality input is sometimes more likely to be offered when commenting, not just forum posting, is available.
    • Comments can often be generally insightful and/or entertaining… sometimes more than the blog entries themselves :-D.

    Negatives:

    • Someone’s gotta monitor those comments… to delete spam, to (ideally, IMHO) delete offensive and off-topic crapfests, to note info to take back to other employees, to correct misconceptions or outright lies, and to (potentially) answer questions in-line.  That takes time… sometimes a LOT of time.  Time that, one could argue, might be better spent actually tackling questions in a forum, fixing bugs, speaking at conferences, retooling UIs, or even getting sleep.  And let’s face it: tech support, at least, is most likely pretty damn inefficient via blog comments (“Help!  When I turn on my qpod, it doesn’t work!”).
    • Sometimes comments can draw out the worst in folks, especially anonymous folks.  Even simple, informative posts can trigger shockingly nasty and uncomfortable exchanges… making the company not only less likely to blog, but (non-masochistic) customers or potential customers less likely to read the blog or even respect the company.
    • Major companies can be attractive targets for comment/trackback-spamming script kiddies.

    *  *  *

    So I’m curious… do you feel the same way I do? 
    – Do you also draw distinctions amongst link, info, and opinion/commentary blogs?
    – Do you care one way or the other about comments on blogs or not?

  • Fair use, mashups, and profits – why hasn’t anyone figured this out yet?

    Lots of us love music and we love to share it; I think that’s even more powerful than simply “grab lots of music for free”—it’s the sharing that excites us, motivates us.  Music is a shared experience!

    Why, then, hasn’t anyone made it easy to share music snippets legally from a simple iframe, a simple widget that someone can cut and paste or even drag and drop into their blog?

    Let me give an example of how painful it is to share (within, IMHO, fair use) a music snippet:
    1) Identify song you want to share with others.  Determine that it’s DRM’d.  Ack!
    2) Remove DRM (yes, I know this may technically be illegal, but frankly I don’t give a damn.  Call it civil disobedience)
    3) Use software to grab a relevant thirty second snippet and save it as an mp3.  Make sure tags are still embedded.
    4) Upload to server.
    5) Before all of this, download and install a good flash player so others can listen to your snippet whether on a Mac or PC.
    6) Embed the appropriate code into your blog entry.

    Check out this entry on the emotional wallop of strings for an example of the result. 

    I think it took me at least 20 minutes just to prepare, upload, and post this one clip.  Does that sound very conducive to sharing to you?!

    So you know what massively puzzles me?  Why on earth hasn’t any major player (Amazon, Rhapsody, Napster, Apple, etc.) made this process easier… not only facilitating the discovery and sharing of music by the increasingly powerful blogosphere, but increasing subscriptions and download sales?!  Let me explain how I envision this working…

    What the blogger / music lover does:
    1) Blogger goes to associates.amazon.com or embed.rhapsody.com or whatever and looks up an album or specific track.
    2) They then selects an embed method (php include, javascript, iframe, etc.) and optionally set other customizable widget options.
    3) If not already logged in, they enter in their subscription ID or affiliate ID so they can get credit from referred subscriptions and purchases.
    4) They copy the specified HTML and paste it into their blog, along with (hopefully) personal comments.

    What the person visiting the blog sees:
    A simple mini-player widget that contains a play button and a short description of the clip (title, artist, album), along with links to:
    – “Learn more about this artist, album, or song”
    – “Purchase this song” (on iTunes, Rhapsody, etc.)
    – “Subscribe to service for unlimited listening to 3 million songs” (again, on Rhapsody, Napster, etc.)

    * * *

    Of course, even cooler would be all the online music folks coming together to make a common standard of some sort, so this widget could actually have a small pulldown menu enabling listeners to buy the tune on or subscribe to their preferred online music service.

    So why hasn’t any of this happened? Some guesses:
    – Music services are shortsighted and want to more tightly (and obnoxiously) control the listening experiences.
    – Music services are scared crapless of lawsuits; despite the fact that any sane person would envision 30 seconds being pretty much fair use, the RIAA would probably sue anyway.
    – Fears over brand tarnishing (putting the names of artists and music services on splog sites featuring child porn, for instance)

    I’m skeptical about the third issue, though. After all, Amazon seemingly lets pretty much anyone embed jpegs of book covers or album covers on raunchy or spammy sites.

    * * *

    So, what to do in the meantime?
    If I wanted to be lazy AND give the finger to non-Windows-users, I could just link to Amazon.com clips, for instance, like this clip of “Where Does the Wayward Footwear Go?” from The Bobs. But that’s pretty inelegant, and it also depends upon Amazon:
    – having the song I want to show off
    – including a decent snippet
    – not changing the URL or blocking folks from accessing it off the Amazon.com domain

    And, to be fair, it’s not a very attractive option for Amazon.com. I mean, what do they get out of it? No potential sales, no branding (except from my arbitrary mention), etc. And unless I manually create a link to the album (“Songs For Tomorrow Morning” ), it’s not even easy for the listener to learn more about the album or group, much less purchase the CD. In other words, it’s a lousy experience for everyone.

    Surely there’s got to be a better way?!

    — –

    Update at 12:58am the next day:
    Hmm… well, there’s Napsterlinks.

    But…
    – They require people to register with Napster before hearing any music (even a 30 second snippet)
    – Each registered user can hear a track only three times total (which is reasonable, IMHO)
    – The embedded widget doesn’t allow one to fast-forward in a song, nor can it contain multiple tracks (much less an album). Just one track per widget :(.
    – There seems to be a bug whereby any page with the widget on it never finishes loading. Weird.

    So, unsurprisingly, napsterlinks are seemingly quite unpopular (I had never actually seen them in the wild, and doing a blogsearch yielded just a tiny handful in existence). Such a lost opportunity!

    And Rhapsody? Sure, you can listen to free tracks with them, but…
    – You’re limited to 25 total plays per month (kinda stingy).
    – You have to download and install their plugin (not too time consuming, though)
    – The player window can’t be embedded :-(.
    – Any click to play a song opens BOTH the player window and a full-sized Rhapsody page. Boo!

    Obviously NOT a decent experience for bloggers :(.

    So, hey, music services… we’re still waiting. Yahoo? Apple?…

  • What makes a blog a community? And are such communities indeed highly fickle?

    I’ve spent much of this weekend dealing with my blogfeeds.  I have well over 200 (haven’t bothered to count ‘em exactly), and I’m tens of thousands of posts behind.  Some feeds I’ve just had to (often regretfully) unsubscribe from, others I’ve “reset to zero” (admittedly just masking a larger problem), but—most interestingly to me—I’ve become more acutely aware that some blogs have a thriving community and others do not.

    Some examples of blogs I perceive to have strong communities:

    What indicates a strong community on a blog? (I’m not counting “meta” sites like Digg, Slashdot, MeFi, etc., by the way)

    • Entries tend to have many comments.
    • Commenters tend to stick around over time (there aren’t just a lot of one-off commenters on individual entries).
    • Commenters aren’t just “talking” to the blogger, but also to each other.

    So what helps establish and maintain a strong blog community?  Some guesses:

    • Reasonably frequent posts (2+ a week)
    • EASY commenting (e.g., no insane captchas, required registrations, etc.)
    • A fixed topic that fascinates a lot of people (politics, gossip, sex, techie stuff, etc.)
    • Many readers (though, perhaps unsurprisingly, this is clearly neither necessary nor sufficient)
    • Popularity of the blogger in real life (due to career, good looks, large friend base, perceived influence, etc.)
    • Popularity of the blogger online.

    The last item is complex enough to merit its own subitems ;-).  Popular folks online recursively attract more popularity because:

    • Their blogs are linked from many other sites (more traffic, greater perception of “importance”)
    • Commenters (rightly) perceive that posting on their blogs will attract attention to *them* (the commenters).
    • Additionally, commenters (again, often correctly) assume that A-listers may notice them and think more highly of them, link to them, etc.

    Note, by the way, that “compelling, original content” and “engaging writing” don’t seem to correlate with the strength of blog communities.  I have plenty of blogs in my feed list that have amazing content and feature outstanding writing… but are devoid of any measurable sense of community.  Conversely, I’ve seen quite a few blogs (no, not the ones I listed at top!) that tend to offer somewhat stale writing and uncompelling content, yet still feature a thriving community.  I suppose it’s much like the Entertainment world at large, eh?  Popular megab(r)ands rake in the fans and the bucks while many independent artists starve for funds and attention.  But I digress.

    *  *  *

    I do have a somewhat obnoxious theory, though.  I think about 2% of blog readers account for 98% of blog comments.  The LC:  Loquacious Commenterati.  Often un- or independently-employed, quite often geeky (sitting at a computer all day and often into the night). 

    Why does this matter?

    1. Blog communities are likely to be less diverse than one might wish.  My very-smart-and-interesting parents, for instance, do e-mail, send IMs, read newspapers and look at photos online, but I am fairly certain they’ve never commented on a blog.
    2. Blog communities (like any communities, I suppose) can be fickle, both due to selfish reasons (A-lister no longer works for Impressive Company, cute blogger is no longer single) or more extrinsic reasons (commenters get demanding full-time jobs, start getting laid, start having families—though not necessarily all at once!)
    3. Blog communities can pressure bloggers to alter the frequency, topical focus, transparency, monetizeability, and other aspects of their blog, even when such modifications are not necessarily in the bloggers’ interests.

    With all of that said, I must nonetheless insist that I am not attempting to denigrate all LCs (of which, admittedly, I am often one myself).  Many are my kind friends, colleagues I greatly respect, and so on.  But in the aggregate, I still find the seeming-capriciousness of blog communities and LCs to be both fascinating and occasionally disconcerting.

    *  *  *

    So now, in a rather ironic but not-unexpected twist, I welcome your comments below.

    • Why do some blogs boast a thriving community, whereas others are commently-baren?
    • If you’re an LC, what motivates you?  Do you feel that motivates most LCs?
    • Are blog communities and LCs really as fickle as I suggest?  And if so, is that even a bad thing?