Author: gulley

If you visit this site regularly, you may have noticed that every now and then lurid, bizarre, or simply commercial but inappropriate comments get posted here (personal favorite: “I don’t really think your thoughts are right. Maybe you need a loan?”). It’s comment spam, designed to increase the Google rating of some tasteless URL. My site has been receiving a marked increase in spam comment postings for the last month or so. Sometimes three or four get through, and once in a while several hundred get through, but mostly they get rejected, thanks to Jay Allen’s Blacklist plugin. Here’s a plot of the spam activity over the last month.

These are all comments that got blocked by Jay Allen’s wonderful software. Notice that when it gets bad, I’m getting more than 300 spam comments a day, usually in bursts during which I get two or three a second. It’s so offensive that it’s easy to take it personally. Those bastards are trying to take me down. But really, it’s not personal at all. I appear on a list somewhere in China or Russia or wherever, and so I come in for my share of punishment along with all the other spam-smeared Movable Type sites out there.

It makes me wonder about the economic aspects of this arms race. They have an infinite supply of email addresses; these are free, of course. But they have to pay to get domain names. I can block new domain names easily, but they can register new ones quickly. I am currently blocking 22 variations on Texas Hold’em poker domains! Is their increased Google rating really worth registering all those domains? The cost to them is small but real. The cost to me is a few minutes of annoyance every week. Who wins?

Very soon after I started using bookmarks back at the dawn of time (ca. 1995) I found them too tedious to be worth the trouble. I spent lots of time categorizing them, but very little time actually using them. It took me a little while using a blog to realize that my blog is the answer that eluded me with bookmarks. I use my blog mostly as an extended outboard memory. It helps me refine what I think about a site, add some notes, and then store it in a searchable zone where I can easily find it again. I’ve made use of this site retrieval aspect of blogging again and again. Blogging is what bookmarking should have been.

Most of the time.

But there are still plenty of interesting sites that don’t warrant even a paragraph. There aren’t enough hours in the day to make blogworthy notes about bookmarkworthy sites. Some sort of bookmarkish approach is still needed. But what? A recent NY Times article discussed this topic: What’s Next: Now Where Was I? New Ways to Revisit Web Sites. Recently, though, I’ve become enamored with del.icio.us, the social bookmarking service with the absurd name. I resisted for a long time solely because of the ridiculous name, but eventually peer pressure got the better of me. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Hold your nose and dive right in. It’s a very good service, and one that benefits much from its community-oriented aspect. What is Clay Shirky bookmarking? This: http://del.icio.us/cshirky. What does Jon Udell have to say about Bloglines? http://del.icio.us/judell/bloglines. And finally, this is me: http://del.icio.us/gulley

Jason Kottke makes some good observations about “Web as platform”. He’s sharpening ideas that I’ve been pondering a lot over the last few weeks. There’s been a real blossoming of activity related to linking, leveraging, and cross-feeding blogs, wikis, and web services of all kinds, almost a Cambrian explosion of activity. And it’s becoming clearer how all these disparate pieces can fit together into a whole. Give his little essay a read.

Google’s IPO has been getting consistently bad press in the last few weeks. “Don’t expect much,” we’re told. “They won’t actually do very well,” we’re told. “Competition is much worse than we originally believed, the economy isn’t doing very well, and you know what? those two founder guys are smarty-pants jerks.”

This is all a little unusual, given that we’re used to seeing high tech IPOs being pitched with something more like insanely irrational exuberance. What gives? Here’s a good article that explains at least some of the reasons behind the bad press: Jubak’s Journal (MSN Money). It turns out that the investment bankers who usually profit by making sunny predictions for IPOs won’t be coming in for their typical unfair share of cash with Google, so they’re taking their PR machine and going home. It just underscores, once again, that you can’t expect people, especially investment bankers, to give up their fat cash cows without a fight. Just ask them. They’ll tell you a good story about how they not only deserve all that money, but they’re actually providing a valuable service to the economy.

I think this situation is all to the good. We don’t need another bubbly frothy tech IPO, so if Google tanks on its own merits, fine. On the other hand, it’s great to see the old system being punctured, so if Google takes off, that’s great too. As the Economist puts it:

Google plans to bypass the traditional way IPOs are sold. It will establish the share price in part through an auction, rather than by relying solely on highly paid investment banks to set it. That last bit is welcome news. The traditional way of floating a company is neither very efficient nor sufficiently transparent.

Every time innovations in financial markets take money away from bankers, you would swear the sky was going to fall. Hasn’t happened yet.

I’m currently reading Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich. It’s a remarkably personal take on what it was like to be around Hitler between 1933 and 1945. In the book, Hermann Goering comes off as such a pompous buffoon that it’s hard to believe he was Hitler’s hand-picked successor. I wanted to learn a little more about Goering, and in doing so I came across the following remarkably current quote from this page on the Nuremberg war crimes trial. In it, a psychologist named Gustave Gilbert is observing that, contrary to what Goering is implying, the people don’t want war.

Goering: “Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”

Gilbert: “There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.”

Goering: “Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”

That’s a good one to keep in mind as election time rolls around.

Years ago I was in church watching an organist perform, and as he reached a feverish crescendo in the piece I said to myself, “Wow, he’s really pulling out all the stops.” It was only at that moment that I realized this was the literal origin of that particular figure of speech. Every time I had used the phrase “pull out all the stops” before that moment, I had been treating it as a single lumped-together word whose meaning I understood but whose derivation was unknown and unsought.

A figure of speech is a sort of lumped word once it comes unhinged from its source. “Hook, line, and sinker” is easy enough for anyone to work out; “lock, stock, and barrel” is somewhat more puzzling. And when someone speaks of their “salad days“, what are they talking about? You can picture someone being tarred and feathered, but if you say someone has been drawn and quartered, do you realize how gruesome the image is you’re calling up? And is the phrase you’re on the verge of saying “cut and dried” or “cut and try”?

All the links in the phrases above point to The Phrase Finder, a fun reference on the origins and correct usage of phrases. Use the Phrase Finder and avoid lumpy language. For instance, if you like the phrase “rule of thumb“, you should look up its origin (or perhaps its supposed origin) and see if you still like it…

Wikipedia is one of the wonders of our age. It just keeps getting bigger, and I often find now that when I google to learn more about a topic, the first or second item returned is a very good article on Wikipedia. All free, built from nothing by everybody in less than three years.

Slashdot hosted a question-and-answer format with Wikipedia founder Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales. Slashdot | Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales Responds. Here’s an excerpt that captures his philosophy in a nutshell.

It is my intention to get a copy of Wikipedia to every single person on the planet in their own language. It is my intention that free textbooks from our wikibooks project will be used to revolutionize education in developing countries by radically cutting the cost of content. … Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.

Basically what I think works in a wikis is to trust people to do the right thing, and trust them as much as you can possibly stand it, until it hurts your head and makes you scared for what they’re going to break. Because that is what works.

Between Google’s IPO, its Gmail venture, Wikipedia, and the rise of a vigorous blogging culture, I believe we are entering the next period of go-go Internet excitement. A lot of good stuff is happening, and if I were Microsoft, I would be concerned. The next big trends, by and large, are online services that you can do through a basic browser (i.e. not a proprietary Microsoft rich client). Starting with email, Google has an excellent platform to eat at the edges of the Microsoft empire one Office product at a time.

And things are finally happening again in the browser world, with the momentum shifting to free yet innovative products like Firefox and Mozilla. Read Ben Hammersley’s article on the Guardian: The second browser war.

I’m a big fan of Bloglines, the free online newsfeed aggregator. I keep talking about how aggregators are a big deal, and as time passes I believe this more and more. And aggregators are a natural fit for an online service like Bloglines (as opposed to a downloadable client like FeedDemon), because they can benefit from a sort of “super-aggregation” across all Bloglines users. I get good recommendations on new blogs to subscribe to, and of course I can use the exact same setup at home and at work. Here’s my current personal newsfeed list.

Here’s an example of why aggregators are so damned useful. I wanted to follow the Tour de France, but I’m not a huge cycling fan; I was just hopping on the Lance Armstrong bandwagon. So I wanted to have a quick and easy way to check the cycling headlines every day. I found the page I wanted on the BBC’s site: BBC Sport | Other Sports | Cycling | UK Edition. From my Bloglines account, I subscribed to the RSS feed for this page, and voila! I had a simple but effective headline news about exactly the story I was interested in. No need to scan through the sports pages. And now that Lance has picked up trophy number six, I can unsubscribe and stop paying attention to cycling news.

It turns out that Jon Udell also likes Bloglines. Check out his comments here.