Of note, yesterday marks the 7th anniversary of my blogging endeavors. Why is it that I always watch druggie movies in November?

I find myself commenting a lot on how stupid Digg is. Not the concept itself, which is basically Slashdot evolved and on steroids. The problem is that the average posters are morons.

It is a well established fact that the louder you are, in general, the lower your intelligence is. It so happens that smart people tend to be introverts. They put their thoughts in writing, and if need be, they will write substantial essays/blogposts on subjects near and dear to them. But their thoughts are always secondary to whatever their passion is, whether that is coding, poetry, health-care, TV, science, sailing, art, Star Trek, the Simpsons, Apple fanboyism, etc., etc. Introverts are unlikely to leave inane comments floating around the Internet (except when they’re drunk.)

In contrast, since most people are extroverts, there are, by sheer statistics, more stupid people in this particular group. You know the type. The folks who are always jibber-jabbering away about nothing in particular. You know, obsession over American Idol, or defending the profligate behavior of Paris Hilton. Sometimes you can’t help but wonder if they’re hopelessly narcissistic and just like the way their voice sounds. Yap, yap, yap. Sound and fury signifying nothing.

These are the folks who leave their stupid spoor droppings on Digg, with undescriptive titles and pointless descriptions that say “title says it all.” They’re the ones who leave the ignorant, ill-informed, rude, and contentious comments, the ones that are patronizing, the ones that ineptly describe some well-known cyberspace phenomenon, apparently unaware that there are lots of people who have been on the Internet way before 2006. I mean, you can feel the neurons in your brain apoptosing if you read too many of these comments. And these are the ones that aren’t dug down into oblivion!

So why do I subject myself to it?

I blame RSS.

No, seriously, RSS has been a godsend. Instead of having to keep a bloated bookmark file of my favorite blogs, I can just load them up into my RSS viewer. Instead of clicking on every bookmark one-by-one, seeing if someone has updated, I can just watch the ever-flowing stream of posts scrolling down my screen, like an intelligible version of the display on “The Matrix”

What this convenience gives me is that I have a lot more time to read random blogs. I’m following something like 450 sites or so, and it still takes far less time to skim through the headlines and teasers than it would be to click and check maybe 20-30 blog sites.

So I’m pretty easy when it comes to adding someone to my RSS feed roll. It’s easier for me to branch out, read blog posts from people who have clearly different sensibilities and opinions from me. I have even added 1 or 2 intelligent conservative sites (just this close from being a complete oxymoron), partly because they articulate their opinions smartly, and partly because it always pays to see what the other side is thinking. And this is the rationale for keeping Digg in the list, no matter what sorts of nonsense happens to come by.

But, seriously, headlines matter. If the headline is unhelpful or, worse, badly-written, as in, me-no-speak-English-good (or any other language for that matter), there’s no way I’m going to read the teaser, much less the article. (Although I must say, one of my other pet peeves are sites that only give you teasers. I rarely add sites like these to my RSS feed list, unless they’re simply impossibly brilliant.) Digg is by far the worst offender in this regard. I can scroll through an entire page of Digg postings and not find anything of interest.

The signal-to-noise ratio is discouraging.

And yet Digg offers a window into the brains of 13-24 year old gaming nerds, a perspective that I otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to, so I always hesitate whenever I see a really stupid post that makes me want to just expunge this idiocy from my consciousness.

Anyway, the above expository rant was provoked by this particular post on Digg: NoFollow Just Isn’t Cool. Allegedly written by an SEO schiester, it details why this comment spam deterrent is “unfair,” citing a bizarre interpretation of the nature of free speech, and an even more bizarre interpretation of when reciprocity is expected.

Now, I admit, I don’t know why I respond to this kind of drek, but, well, I guess I’m just not one of the smart ones I was talking about, tending to lean more towards the morons of the world. Whatever. May God have mercy on my soul.

But I’ll actually take this post seriously. For those who aren’t in the know, the nofollow attribute is an attempt by Google to prevent the gaming of their PageRank system, which factors in how many links a particular site has pointing to it, in order to calculate how popular a site is, and which ultimately determines how close to the top the site appears when a particular search query is entered.

Thanks to brilliant solutions like Akismet, which is setup by default in Wordpress, the scourge of comment spam is nowhere near as bad as e-mail spam, but machine intelligence will never outdo human intelligence, and enough comment spam comes by that even the typical blogger who posts for the benefit of two or three people gets bothered by advertisements for Cialis or Russian mail-order brides. It’s all probability, I guess. Bother enough people for enough time, and a few are bound to actually want to buy things from you.

Personally, I think spammers should be classified as unlawful combatants and interned at Gitmo, but that’s just me, and you spammers out there should be thankful that I’m essentially unelectable to public office. Because you scum would be on the top my agenda, and certainly on the top my mafia hit list.

But I digress.

But what the technique really entails is posting spam comments all over the place, loading up as many unique URLs with links to your shady prescription drug selling site, so that the Googlebot awards you hella points and gives you a massive PageRank. And when someone types in “Viagra” into Google, your site will be on the front page for all the sad impotent bastards in the world to see.

So what Google did was suggest the nofollow attribute. Googlebot ignores any links that have this attribute tag, and thereby awards no points, and thereby fails to inflate said PageRank. Some sad fucks still keep trying despite the fact that Wordpress adds this tag by default, but it’s decreased the utility of the so-called Googlebomb.

Now, I have no problem with this. For one thing, it’s your site. While I’m a strong proponent of freedom of speech, technically, a blog is not a public commons, not the way that a courthouse or a town square is. It’s a private (virtual) location that the owner graciously opens up to people who he/she expects will abide by common courtesy. It’s like any place of business. The owner can always reserve the right to deny service or even access. So if you’re acting like an asshole, there’s nothing in the U.S. Constitution that gives you a right to continue doing so.

Now given this framework, I find it extremely offensive that someone should assume that because they posted to my blog, I owe them a link. Fuck you. I didn’t ask you to comment. Hell, as far as I’m concerned, I’m giving you the privilege to add your own thoughts to my site. There are no rights involved here. I’ll delete your shit if it’s ignorant, offensive, or otherwise worthless, and that’s too bad for you. The hell I’m going to give you any Googlejuice.

The organic way to gain page rank is to impress a blogger so much that they add you to their blogroll. Or at least maybe put a link in their blogpost pointing to you. These links are supposed to be followed by Googlebot. And this provides more realistic data about how much other people actually find your site interesting.

And if you think about it, the reciprocal mechanism for sharing thoughts was not supposed to be primarily through comments. Comments are really more suited to responses that don’t warrant an actual blog post. And obviously, for people who don’t have blogs, this is the only way to go. (Come on, who doesn’t have a blog these days?) But people who have blogs? The mechanism that was supposed be used was the trackback. So when you saw a blog post that you wanted to respond to at length, instead of posting a little comment, you would write an entry in your blog and add a link pointing to the blogpost you are referring to.

But sadly, spammers fucked that up long ago, and trackbacks pretty much went by the wayside. Thank you for that, goddamn spammers. Way to go.

Bottom line: no one owes you anything on the blogosphere. If you’re doing something expecting some kind of reward, or return, you’re just deluding yourself.

Quizzes. Not from J™. Unfortunately I don’t remember the source.

Mingle² - Free Online Dating

78%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Mingle² - Online Dating

OK this one is from J™:

I am certified: 34% addicted to Myspace Are you addicted to MySpace?

And in the same vein:

You’re Strung Out on MySpace!!!
Take Are you addicted to MySpace? today!
Created with Rum and Monkey’s Personality Test Generator.

Curse you, Tom.

And Rupert Murdoch needs to hire some people who actually know how to code. Myspace looks like Web 1.0 circa 1996. I’m surprised that they actually use CSS. And that the blink tag isn’t all over the place inducing epilepsy.

Man, that was an incredible waste. Three hours down the drain just to get a stupid RSS widget to work in Myspace. I wish that Myspace would just let me crosspost to their blog engine, but noooo.

It would probably be worthwhile to chronicle how I ended up having to write my own widget, and to document all the dead-ends I ran into until I settled on doing this, but, frankly, I’ve wasted enough time. Bleh.

In other news, the levels of procrastination to which I have risen no know bounds. I honestly need a swift kick in the ass. And I need to turn off this stinking computer. Damn.

Procrastination is like masturbation. At first, it might feel pretty good, but in the end, you’re only screwing yourself. —Anonymous

Hope? Don’t talk to me about hope. One day at a time, brother. One day at a time.

Tim O’Reilly replies to his critics regarding his proposed blogger’s code of conduct.

I agree with the gist of his message, which is that civility is important. Without it, there can be no real discussions. Once we get dragged down by the name-calling, the baseless accusations, the flaming, the trolling, and the invocation of Nazism, it’s over. Hence, Godwin’s Law.

Note that Godwin’s Law came into existence on Usenet. In many ways, network news was the precursor of blogging, and they figured out a lot of these issues way back when. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

And again, there really are potential legal liabilities with hosting a blog. Just consider slander and libel. You can say all you like about people owning what they wrote, but I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: the fact that the blogger has the power to delete comments leads inexorably to the fact that the blogger has a duty to moderate his/her site. Sure, you can refuse to delete comments, no matter how offensive. But we must recognize that the blogger chooses to allow this. If something inflammatory and insulting is on your site, whether or not you wrote it, you still have a hand at allowing it to be visible.

You simply cannot abdicate your responsibility as moderator.

Tim O’Reilly’s post about a blogger’s code of conduct has generated much discussion across the blogosphere and has actually been picked up by the MSM outlets such as the BBC and the New York Times.

What such a code is mostly about is who is responsible for the comments on one’s blog. While people’s different ideological philosophies regarding free speech inform how different blog owners run their site, the law is clearly not silent on the matter of speech, although, granted, there has yet to be a test case that has actually resulted in an actual judgement on the matter.

The creation of such a code is merely an attempt to pre-empt the courts from eventually completely deciding what’s what. I mean, eventually, someone is going to post a comment that will result in something actually criminal happening: murder, rape, or acts of terrorism. It’s really only a matter of time before words translate into actions, really. While the commenter may hide under the cover of (relative) anonymity, clearly the blogger would become an object of investigation. (And I say relative anonymity, because if a crime does occur, you know that law enforcement will eventually come banging at the door of the various ISPs involved, demanding server logs.)

In such a hypothetical court case, I can only imagine that the mere existence of a blogger’s code of conduct would be enough to influence the minds of the judge and jury, justly or unjustly. To the folks out there who would rather not codify such things: it’s too late, these things are codified.

Reiteration, consolidation, and discussion about the issues are all useful, but I find it somewhat annoying that people are talking about blogs as if there has never been any discussion at all about the duties and responsibilities of anyone engaging in discussion over the Internet, whether as a participant or as an administrator (see RFC 1855 which discusses Netiquette Guidelines.) This has pretty much been a topic of discussion since the beginning of those heady days that some might call the Eternal September.

And make no mistake, the fact that you have a blog with comments de facto makes you an administrator. I can’t see any other way to look at it. For one thing, your blogging platform will undoubtedly give you the power to delete comments, whether you wish to or not. This automatically makes it part of your duty to be a moderator. And while you can wholeheartedly choose to never delete comments, you’re nonetheless going to be the one responsible for making that decision. I think this is the crux of the idea that you are going to have to own not only your own words, but the words of the people commenting on your blog. Sure, you don’t own them in the sense of copyright or (perhaps) in the sense of legal liability (for example, would you be liable if someone left comments that were threatening to the president of the U.S.? No one knows for a fact. Yet.) But you can’t deny the fact that you can choose to approve or delete, and this puts a duty on you. It’s just like the role of an editor, really. You didn’t write it, but you’re responsible for allowing it to be displayed. Simple as that.

The other point of contention that is being discussed throughout the internets is who exactly is going to enforce this code? Again, these issues have already been talked about ad nauseam for the past decade and a half, and it’s clearly going to be enforced the way it’s always been: readers vote with their browser, admins vote with their mouse clicks and keypresses. There is no reason for anyone to tolerate speech that they don’t want to tolerate. If you don’t like it, just don’t look at it. On the flip side of the coin, if you own the blog, you get to decide what gets presented. It’s disingenous to pretend that blog owners don’t have a say regarding comments.

And there isn’t anything wrong about deciding to allowing everything and anything in your comments section. But recognize that you’re making the decision. You’re under no duress to leave comments open and unmoderated.

But, as I’ve said, one of these days, the courts are going to end up meddling in all of this. It’s better to discuss it now before someone gets killed or maimed, whether physically, mentally, or financially. Hyperbole? Maybe. But it would be stupid to say that the written word can’t affect the real world.

The big internet meme today seems to be that Microsoft is dead, and to claim that a multibillion dollar company that is still making enormous profits is dead is no mean feat.

But I think that Graham has it right. MS is definitely operating in catch-up mode, and they really don’t have a good sense of what people want. I personally think that they killed themselves, by being too aggressive, too arrogant, too confrontational. This resulted in the string of anti-trust judgements that they eventually lost. And it wasn’t really the losing that did it. It was more the fact that they had to waste a lot of their time fighting these cases. Through these years locked up in the courtroom, little-to-no innovation came out of Redmond, and Google and Apple took advantage of the lack of opposition. MS also wasted time competing with other old-style tech and media companies, like Time-Warner/AOL, Disney, and Sony, to name a few supercorporations that seem to have lost the sense of what the purpose of business is for—to sell people things they actually want, and these companies have also declined in stature to a degree.

It seems to add credence to the idea that CEOs simply can’t relate to the common person. Their heads are too far in the clouds, spinning multibillion dollar deals and keeping the shareholders happy. What they’ve lost touch with is the product, the thing that actually makes them money. Instead of actually focusing on something that people want to buy, they just turn out iterations of things they’ve already made. This doesn’t even work well in the bulky, slow-paced field of something like the auto industry. Look at what’s happened to Ford, GM, Chrysler, by ignoring what people want—fuel economic cars—and instead churning out more of the same—monstrous SUVs that have no practical purpose whatsoever.

Lose the ability to innovate, and it’s over.

You can’t force people to like crappy stuff. You have to make something they’ll actually buy.

In Apple’s case, their ticket to success is obvious. The iPod is neither original nor superior, but it happened to arrive at the perfect time. While Zens and Archos Jukeboxes and Sansas and Zunes are targetted at the geek demographic with their multifarious functions and panels full of buttons, the iPod is made for the average person who can turn it on and play music on it and transfer music from their computer with ease. There are few things that are so brain-dead simple as using an iPod. It’s no exaggeration that it’s compared widely to the Sony Walkman.

You do one thing well, and you stick to it.

And simple means being able to pick a thing up and use it without having to even open up a user’s manual, much less read it.

Apple has mastered the idea of simplicity and elegance. These are the precise things you look for in luxury items. The reason why someone would buy a $60,000 car and not a $10,000 car, even though both of them will get you from point A to point B. And that’s Apple’s niche, really, all this time, all the way back to the very first Macintosh. They know what they make, and their clientele stays happy. Even when Apple was dying without Steve Jobs, they were still churning out computers. Not all of them were exactly the epitomé of simplicity and elegance, but they had enough hits to make up for the misses, and they managed to survive until Steve-o came back to town.

Sony was probably the only one who could’ve done something about the iPod, but they screwed it up years ago by enforcing copy-protection and DRM. Hence, the failure of Mini-Disc, and the laughable attempt at catching up with Apple with their ATRAC-based players. By being hostile to the customer and burdening them with things that they don’t want, they ended up losing a great deal of the market. The same thing can be said of the PS3, which is far too expensive for how little it provides. Then again, Sony seems to be in love with proprietary formats. It’s kind of funny how they never learned their lesson from losing the VHS/Betamax war.

But what exactly does Google sell, you might ask? After all, I use Google all the time, and have yet to pony-up any money to them directly, although granted, I’ve probably clicked on more than a few of their advertisers.

The thing is, Google is ubiquitous. People are half-seriously wondering if Google might be God. It can certainly perform the function of an oracle. Google has the ubiquity that radio and television has only ever dreamed of.

This ubiquity allows them the ability to command premiums for advertising space, and essentially that is the bulk of their business.

But the thing is, they know what their product is: most obviously it’s a search engine, but just as importantly, they sell trust. As long as we can trust Pagerank to work well and not get overthrown by SEOs and blog-spam, the trust we lend Google is pure gold. The moment anyone starts distrusting Google is the moment that their Empire will start their great fall. And because they know what their product is, they know that they have to do this one thing as best as possible. Everything else, as ephemeral and peripheral as it seems, is about search. Think about Gmail. They’re not really showing off a web-based e-mail client. They’re showing off what their search can do. Think about the reason why you probably off-loaded all your e-mail into Gmail—you wanted to be able to utilize their awesome search engine to index your stuff. And it works beautifully.

Look at Google Desktop. Again, the key functionality is search. Same thing with Google Maps, Google Earth. They exist to help you find things. This is the thing that Google is good at. And they’re doing it to the tune of millions of dollars a day.

You look at the vast multiheaded supercorporations, and it’s hard to see what they do well. We come back to Microsoft. You might say that they do OSes well, and certainly, that’s where much of their money is made. But do they really do OSes well? Consider that the 30 year old architecture known as UNIX still runs most of what we call the Internet, and that only foolish sysadmins would risk running anything else on mission-critical tasks. While MS apologists like to scoff at the fact that UNIX is ancient, I think the fact that it’s core is mostly unchanged is testament to the fact that it works so well. And consider that one of the more modern OSes out there—Mac OS X—is nonetheless based on UNIX.

Where Microsoft most definitely kills themselves is with Vista. For one thing, it’s nothing more than a catch-up gambit with Mac OS X, which has already had an 8 year head start (and more, if you consider it’s NeXT roots) There ain’t nothing new under the sun with Vista. It was already stale when it was released.

But the serious death-knell is all the intrusive DRM crap that most people don’t want. Who wants to upgrade and then not be able to view porn? This is probably the biggest reason why people downgrade back to XP—they don’t want to deal with draconian copyright protection garbage that might accidentally lock them out of their system. Who wants to buy something that will give you less features than what you already have?

What Microsoft does relatively well which has no real peer is productivity software. The ubiquity of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint is a testament to that, and really, if you look around, everything else are really just pale clones to this enduring office suite.

But the cores of these technologies have been pretty much unchanged since the GUI became the standard user interface for most computers. What exactly does Word 2007 do that Word 2.0 can’t? Besides being excessively bloated and chock-filled with features I don’t need and I don’t want, that is? (Thank God they killed Clippy.) Oh, I’m sure some power-user can point something out that I’ve overlooked, but frankly, all I really need word for is typing out simple documents, which, if you think about it, can really be simply addressed by markup like XHTML (which has the added advantage of being immediately available on the web for viewing.)

The only time I’ve seriously had to load up Word is whenever someone mails me a DOC file even though a PDF or even a plain text file would do.

I tend to do most of my writing in things like Emacs, TextEdit.app, the text area in Wordpress, or the text area in Gmail anyway, and while I used to be a big font junkie, that’s not really a serious loss, particularly since if I wanted to actually publish something in dead-tree format, I would use a DTP program.

People talk about innovation like it’s something magic and transcendant, but I think it’s really about having your finger on the pulse of the customer. The way the market works, people buy things they like, and you start putting things in your product that people don’t like, and even if it’s a little thing like DRM or Clippy, it’s enough to demonstrate that you don’t really have the customer’s best interest in mind. It’s not enough to aspire to feature creep, either. So what if your new product has 200 new things in it, if it’s not anything anyone will use.

You might argue that they don’t just want some of this stuff, they need it, and many use this argument for the reason why desktop OSes and word processing software persist, but realistically, there are very few things that you actually need besides food, shelter, and clothing, and even there, if you look at how those things are bought and sold, you can’t add features to these things that inconvenience and/or aggravate people. No one will buy it.

So yeah, like IBM before them, I’m sure Microsoft will be around for a long, long time, but then again, I won’t be surprised if they simply become the biggest software publisher for Mac OS X, either.

In the wake of the debacle amongst the “A” listers in which a prominent female blogger is threatened with sexual abuse and death, I find that even the MSM (that’s mainstream media, not men having sex with men) ended up writing about it, specifically wondering whether or not we need a blogging code of conduct. Darleene muses about who would even enforce such a thing, but interestingly, we already have a code of conduct.

In the early days of the Internet, even before 1993 and the Eternal September, we had Netiquette, eventually codified in an actual RFC {What is an RFC?} by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the organization tasked with promoting Internet standards.

Netiquette is specifically covered by RFC 1855 {official plaintext version}, which was formalized in October 1995, and like much of Internet planning, was intended to remain future-proof. So while it doesn’t specifically mention blogs (mostly because the term “€œblog”€ didn’t exist until around 1999), it does address one-to-many communication, which is essentially what a blog is useful for.

And enforcement will be performed exactly like enforcement was performed on Usenet or in IRC—”by loud, vociferous debate, flaming and counter-flaming, and eventually by kicking and banning of select targets by those who have the power to do such things.

So you see, blogging has been and will continue to be subjected to the flame wars and pedantry that used to be confined to September, but which is now still eternal. Newbies, as always, lookout. It does remain to be seen what the next big one-to-many communication format will be.