January 31, 2005
To burn your feed and own it it, too
So this is what happens when Dave Winer cites one of your entries and goes to sleep. Thanks for all your comments and linkage.
When the use of a tracking bug was mentioned as possible way to throw FeedBurner statistics at your local feed, I asked on the FeedBurner forums:
For those of us hellbent on keeping their feeds on their own server, have you ever thought of offering FeedBurner's feed statistics through a tracking bug? Users would insert a small image with the FeedBurner logo into their fulltext feeds. The image would reside on FeedBurner's servers and should allow you to pull all the referer information you need.
People who can't or don't want to do the temporary redirect trick would get an alternative way to enjoy FeedBurner's service and word of FeedBurner would be spread even further (eventually readers will wonder about the FeedBurner icons in the posts they subscribe to).
To which FeedBurner's Matt Shobe replied:
Thanks for the suggestion. At this time we're considering a number of options for "off-property" statistics tracking, and we may offer new services that deliver a variation of what you suggest here. It's certainly something we've heard before and we totally understand that some publishers want to self-manage their feed URL, RSS bandwidth usage, and related issues. Your point on additional publicity via image display isn't lost on us, either. ;)
Again, thanks for adding your vote on this service enhancement. We hope to hear from you again when we've rolled out our next statistics-related features.
I'm curious what they have in mind.
Elitist
You know what rocks? You screw up so badly that you lose one of the biggest deals in your lifetime and ultimately have to scrap the product you have been wasting years of your life to build. You then proceed to write about how you would like to beat the shit out of your former self as to not get you in the situation in the first place. After that, someone comes along and calls you an elitist for wanting to kick your own ass.
Sure makes my day.
January 29, 2005
Getting FeedBurned?
Here is a little story for you. Please lean back and enjoy.
Back in the days, I killed legendary amounts of time writing music and publishing it on MP3.com. For those who came in late, MP3.com used to be the place to connect unsigned artists and lovers of independent music, until in 2003 some idiots at Cnet reserved a special circle in hell for themselves by shutting down the site.
It is hard to find words that adequately describe the awesomeness of MP3.com's early years. I had people listening to my music. Occasionally someone would buy one of my albums and MP3.com would sent me a cheque which I could cash in for real money. "Money" like in "the stuff you pay other stuff with". For having people listen to my very heart and soul. How much more badass can it get?
It never occured to me that MP3.com wouldn't be with us until the end of time. I happily printed the pretty address of my MP3.com artist page on every CD I ever sold or gave away. Now imagine my degree of pissedness when MP3.com first started to rape artists that weren't willing to pay their royally priced subscription plans and finally sold out to Cnet. Suddenly my perpetual MP3.com URL was pointing nowhere at all.
In order to arrive at some kind of point, I find the enthusiasm with which sites are happily outsourcing their syndication to FeedBurner to be mildly surprising. While I crave badly for the painless feed statistics that FeedBurner offers and imagine its creator as people of utmost kindness and integrity, empirical evidence suggests that they are not going to be around forever.
By all means, think twice about handing over your feed's URL to a service you don't have any control over. I assume you enjoy being read and wouldn't want have your subscriber base go away when FeedBurner closes up shop. At the very least, exercise some damage control by having your existing feed point to your FeedBurner feed through a temporary redirect.
Once again, no offence intended to the folks at FeedBurner. Maybe I'm just being oversensitive.
January 17, 2005
We need an award for this sort of thing
Just when you thought that blog was the worst word ever and everyone using it should be stuffed into a cannon and shot into a wall, some guy steps forward and rechristens del.icio.us-ish sets of emerged tags Folksonomies.
I mean, Folksonomy. How much lamer can it get?
How to make sure a promising piece of social software technology never gets taken serious: Give it a name which makes everyone working with it look stupid.
January 16, 2005
In praise of 0xDECAFBAD
Do you know the situation when your mind circles around a particular idea for a long time and suddenly you have it all in front of you, written down in clear English, by someone who isn't you? For me one of these someones is Leslie Michael Orchard and his site 0xDECAFBAD, which regularely manages to make some part of my brain resonate.
In the fall of 2003 it was his post Seeking Out Opposites which had me tag Leslie as a mind worth watching. He wrote:
For the past year or two, I've been trying an experiment in my personal research and learning. I've been seeking out tools and technologies which are as different as possible from those with which I already have experience. I want to break up some prejudices and habits I have, and expose myself to more ways of looking at things.
In a culture of penis comparison parties along the lines of "My $whatever is better than your $whatever", I found this to be quite a statement.
Recently I've been thinking a lot about how hard it is to know your place in a trade where you can rule so much and still get your ass handed to you on a regular basis. I see this long clouded path no matter if I look ahead or behind me, making it impossible to know where I stand.
Out of nowhere enters Beginner's Mind versus Teacher's Mind, a true gem of webloggery and an amazingly accurate map of my current train of thoughts:
In learning, I’ve tried to keep an open and unassuming mind about things. And even after I have learned quite a bit about something, and I can demonstrate obvious expertise with something to anyone who’s watching, I still consider myself a beginner. There’s always someone who knows more about that thing than I do—from whom I want to learn even more—so I don’t ever want to let myself feel like I’ve arrived and allow my learning to be clouded.
So herein lies the rub: If I’m always a beginner, how can I ever be a teacher? It’s not so much a rational issue—it’s more an issue of emotion and habits of thought. Rationally, I think it’s safe to say that as I learn about something, I climb up a ladder of experts’ shoulders. And below me, still down the ladder, are other beginners doing the climb. But where I run into trouble is in trying to figure out where I am on the ladder, and where and how I should make myself available as a rung. Because, there are so many others at and above my level already providing their shoulders, and the climb still has so much farther yet to go above me.
Watch this guy.
January 06, 2005
Goodbye Trackback, I barely knew thee
Apparently some spammer finally invested the the five minutes necessary to produce a script capable of flooding this site with abusive trackback pings. Unless I discover a quick hack to make trackbacks approval-only in Movable Type, trackbacks are so off.
Now this is just the latest symptom of an issue I've been wondering about for some time. When weblogging became the hip thing to do some years ago, we already had newsgroups, forums and guestbooks burried under truckloads of spam for viagra and animal porn. Even the worst web programming tutorials began with a two page indoctrination about how you should always assume that every user could be satan himself. And yet the way comments and trackbacks have been implemented up to the present day is just crying for abuse. "Not having learned from past mistakes" doesn't come close to what has happened here.
Looking at the options I have for combatting comment and trackback spam, fellow webloggers recommend using a blacklist, renaming your scripts and looking for nasty words. Now place yourself in the position of a spammer and read the last sentence again. While I do appreciate these efforts, really, how cute is this?
I assume that most of you have some sort of life going on that is unrelated to weblogging. I don't have time to check my site every hour because my spam fighting technique is merely doing damage control.
