A Little Paranoia is a Healthy Thing / Formerly on Just In

Originally published on "Just In: Joseph Dunphy's Newsblog / Connecting to Digg" on February 16, 2008. The post begins:



"Yet another blog from he who could fill out the ones he already has a lot more? Perhaps, but like any good would-be engineer, I'm being cautious. Well nourished and in good spirits as I enjoy a plate of that fine brisket Wordpress shares with new users who read the TOS



but at little wary, as I pass my mac and cheese serving over to the next user to the left. Is that bacon in those collards? Oh, well ...



In my "Keep an eye on these sites" post on Monday Never Comes, I mentioned the annoying habit a number of sites had, Digg included - that of sticking "rel=nofollow" tags on the homepages links of its users. Digg still does that, but it doesn't stick such links on the linkbacks given to those who blog its articles. Discovering this left me a little more inclined to use my membership their site, but I soon found another annoying habit of theirs. In order to "blog" an article on Digg, one has to give Digg the password for one's blog. Not that I'm saying that Digg or one of its employees would put that password to bad use, but long before I had ever heard of the Internet, I had already seen supposedly respectable, trustworthy individuals in positions of far greater authority engage in conduct far more scandalous than a little hacking. No, I'm not going to name names, but we are talking "obstruction of justice" - as much comfort as may be found in the thought that a man must rise to the occasion when others depend on him, real life is far less comforting, and sensible men will prepare themselves for that reality.



I don't believe that Digg or - more to the point - any rogue employee of Digg - will misuse the password for this blog, in fact I think that's highly, highly unlikely, and if I didn't, I wouldn't dream of filling out that form. HOWEVER, if somebody at Digg does do so, and this blog is vandalised or so misused in my name that Wordpress has to delete it, all that I'm going to lose, arise from this introduction and maybe a few decorative touches to be added later, will be the excerpts uploaded by Digg and links to places where I discuss the articles excepted. Further, since I am not going to share that password with anybody but Digg, if it is misused by somebody at some company which is in possession of it, there will be little question left as to at which company that person works, meaning that the buck in this case would be likely to stop very quickly.



Were that to happen, I would be mildly ... ummm ... "physically loved" ... but the offending party and his employer would be far more deeply so, and very little material original to me would be lost. Mainly, what would occur would be that Digg's pagerank would be infinitesimally decreased, because all non-nofollowed links from my sites to theirs would suddenly be cut. While the reverse would be true as well, I wouldn't be losing anything in this regard that Digg and its employees couldn't take from me without possession of the password for this blog simply by deleting my account there, an action that wouldn't pose the danger to Digg's corporate reputation that a misuse of confidential information would, and wouldn't raise the issue of possible federal prosecution - system intrusion is not viewed as gently as it used to be.



Really, then all I'm trusting Digg and its employees to do, as I hand them the password to this blog whose sole purpose is to be an interface between my sites and theirs, is to not choose to do harm to themselves without purpose. While anybody old enough to have a past knows that rationality or even sanity is not a given, to anticipate it in others certainly represents a far shorter leap of faith than does the presumption of good will, and doing things this way does, at least, limit the damage that a rogue company (or employee) can do, meaning that any damage caused by a misplacement of faith will be contained, at least to some extent.



I hope that Wordpress is OK with this. I suspect that they are, as Digg does have a "Wordpress" option under blogging, but if not, they have my e-mail address, and on the first word I see from them indicating that they are not happy with this use of their system, I will cease and desist without further argument and find a use for this space that they will be happier with, as soon as I can. As I've heard of no Digg related scandals, I suspect that there is no real danger, but I hope that any admin reading this will at least appreciate the fact that I gave the issue enough thought, that I made a point of structuring the incentives in such a way to minimize the risk.



That's my thinking behind the creation of this interface. I'll leave out the usual sincere hope that you'll enjoy your stay, because this is more a place you'll be passing through, maybe a lot should you become a regular reader and I become a more regular poster, which at some point in the near future, I expect I will."



End of post. So went the thinking, when I found myself confronted with what I felt to be Digg's highly unreasonable request for my password, as a condition for blogging one of their articles. Yesterday, on looking in on that blog and the one and only article I blogged used to used it to blog, on Digg, I found that the linkback to my blog, and to the blogs of the others who had blogged that same article, were missing. I never received any notices of the removal. Digg seemed happy to hold onto a link it was no longer reciprocating.

I might as well have not bothered setting up the newsblog; Digg ended up dealing with me, as it did with others, in bad faith. The remedy, at this point, is a simple one - I'm going to recycle the "newsblog", changing its name (and its password, you can be sure), deleting all posts currently there as I put it to a new use, and replacing all links to Digg with links directly to content, when such links aren't deleted altogether. I'll still visit digg.com, because I gain some benefit from doing so - it's a rich source of good quality links - but the fact that I have a membership there will become so irrelevant, that I doubt that I'll ever log back in.

Which brings us to the basic problem with Digg - its staff has foolishly structured the incentives it gives to its users in such a way as to leave most of us with little, if any, good reason to want to remember that we are users. Where is the love for those who make the site work, to the benefit of the company and the rest of its users?

After what I just told you, you should be able to see why somebody might not want to blog any more articles on Digg.com, itself; this costs that site a source of its traffic. But think of the people who really make the site work, and why one might not want to be one of those people. Let's say that one submits four different posts, and that they're good posts, but somebody - a well connected somebody - gets his friends together, and buries all four of them. As I understand the TOS at Digg, one would lose one's account, and find that there was no way of appealing this possibly malicious act of "community moderation" (read "mob rule"), no chance for somebody's common sense to override the mindless application of a formula. The votes are in and one is gone, and that's that.

This hasn't happened to me, but I am told that it has happened to others and really, where is the surprise? If one choses to be active on a site where mob rule is a reality, and one doesn't wish to become to next victim, one does well to have a mob of one's own. Having assembled it, one had better keep it busy, if people are to remember that they're part of it at all, and not go wandering off. Infighting within such a system, then, is no historical accident, but merely the inevitable outcome of the perverse incentives put in place by the system, which only act to reinforce the natural, petty human jealousies that have so often been seen on the Internet, for so long.

Is somebody submitting more interesting links than one, and worse still, seem a little more intelligent and articulate, stealing the attention that one knows should be coming one's way? Then just gather a few friends together and have him silenced. Or maybe his political point of view is gaining adherents at the expense of one's own, one feels, and the pages he is sharing are helping to accelerate that trend. One could respond to that by rethinking one's thoughts, or articulating them better, or at least look for somebody who had - but why work that hard? Just bury him into oblivion, ending the problem and reaffirming one's friendship - if one can call it that - with the other members of the floating lynch mob, with this triumph one has shared with them, at somebody else's expense.

It's a system built to be abused, and that's a shame. I hope that Digg will rethink its choices, but I seriously doubt that this will occur. If you've been to the Ravine, you've probably seen some links to pages about a former Digg user called "Zaibatsu", and the treatment he received. More about him, later, but I think you'll find that it isn't encouraging reading.

"In other words, Joseph - Digg, a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there?" As cliched and derivative as that sounds, yes, that's the conclusion I've drawn, at least for the moment.

YMMV

Reply to Larry Halff / Ma.gnolia

A discussion (of sorts) between a user (me) and the owner of a service (Larry Halff of Ma.gnolia) on that service's homegroup on Flickr:




Me, five days ago: "I was wondering if anybody else was having this problem. I recently got my invitation message to join the new Ma.gnolia - which is very cool - but when I clicked on the link, I found that I couldn't connect to the page one goes to, to accept the invitation. I tried going to Mr. Halff's page - and couldn't connect to that either. Finally, I just tried going to Ma.gnolia itself - and couldn't connect to that, either. Not in Firefox and not in Internet Explorer - most recent releases of both.

Yes, I cleared my cache, ran Spybot and rebooted. No change. Very frustrating, and leaving me wondering if the problem is with the site or with my connection."




Larry Halff, four days ago: "Hi Joseph, I haven't seen any other reports of problems getting to the site. Perhaps it is your connection? Do you get any particular error message when trying to access Ma.gnolia?"




Me, four days ago: "Just that usual one when one tries to go to a site that doesn't exist? I've since been able to get through, though, and start up my account, but run into a few frustrations along the way that I should mention.

Monk is coming on, though, so this will have to wait. First things, first. "




Me, four days ago:

"1. The button on the sign-in page isn't visible in Internet Explorer. It was visible in Firefox and Chrome, however.

2. On going directly to Ma.gnolia from the place where I got my new OpenID and trying to sign up, I found myself on this page, where I was presented with this request:

"Please enter your invitation code below"

As my invitation letter contained nothing of the sort, I guessed and used the string following the .gnolia.com in the url for my invitation page. The system didn't seem to share my enthusiasm for this idea, and I got nowhere.

Clicking on the link, again, though, once I was logged into Open ID on Chrome seemed to work just fine. So, the system did work in the end, but it had a few bugs and at least one quirk: one's screenname isn't one's screenname.

What one enters as a screenname becomes one's id, and what one enters as one's "real name" becomes one's screenname. Not a huge deal, but it will leave a few people scratching their heads for a second."




Me, four days ago: "Uh oh ... now, this is a problem. Having just created a group, I went to start a discussion - and found that I couldn't. That feature doesn't seem to exist in the new Ma.gnolia. Is that a permanent change, or am I missing something?

Also - if we will have discussions, will they be taking place in an all text environment, like the old Ma.gnolia, or will graphical content be allowed? I ask because I've just created a Mathematics group, but Math done in plain text becomes notoriously difficult to read, very quickly. I'm trying to decide whether I should focus my efforts on the Math group, or delete that and spend more effort on subjects that do lend themselves to plain text (eg. philosophy, literature) when posting to Ma.gnolia or moderating groups, there."




Me, today: "I see that you don't want to respond. I'm not surprised. After all, not counting your own personal associates, I was the only user of the old Ma.gnolia to post to the Ma.gnolia wiki, as I did in this post, and yet never got a reply. Obviously, Larry, you don't really value your users' input, which leaves us with the question - why do you ask for it? You did invite us to sign up for that wiki.

OK, whether you value that feedback or not, you're going to get some now. Right now, you and Ma.gnolia are associated with maybe the worst data loss incident in the history of the Internet. One need only google your own company name and see the search suggestions that come up to see just how much of an impression that crash made - it is what your company is now primarily known for, with multiple versions of "Ma.gnolia crashing" being suggested before any more flattering combination. It's a public relations nightmare.

Having been over on the new Ma.gnolia, I found that so few of the old users had returned, that even with the connection problems delaying my entry into Ma.gnolia for a few days, when I went to set up my groups, I had no trouble claiming names as common as "Chicago" and "Mathematics". As I looked around, I kept seeing the same names, over and over, with a frequency that would have been considered unusual even by small town standards. Accept this and come to terms with it - most of your old users aren't coming back.

This is more than understandable. Let's face it - by your own admission, you did mess up. Some of these people lost thousands or even tens of thousands of bookmarks and the commentary that went with them, I understand. Getting hit that way twice would be a hard one to take, so who can blame them, if those who suffered those losses should be a little risk averse at this moment. So, where does this leave you?

You need to get a large number of new users so excited about what you have to offer them, that when they remember what you're best known for at this moment - the January crash - that they'll be willing to forget that for a moment. If you do not succeed in doing so, then I sincerely hope for your sake that you're independently wealthy, because with what appears to be maybe a few dozen users at present, Ma.gnolia isn't going to produce enough income to keep a gerbil fed, much less a full grown man.

Oh, and Larry - I've seen your photostream, and having been poor, myself - I don't believe that you'd adapt to the experience, very well. Your tastes aren't just expensive, they're reliably expensive. After the third week of trying to find yet another way to make rice and beans interesting - and wondering how much longer you'd be able to afford the beans - I suspect that somebody would end up trying to talk you off of a bridge. Worse still, the Tech industry being what it is, odds are that you'd have to settle for the Bay Bridge, because the Golden Gate would probably be booked up a few months in advance, and nobody wants it to come to that.

So, what do you have to offer?




At present, you either don't offer the option of creating discussions in the groups we've set up, or you've somehow made that option a hard one to find. I do remember that the option wasn't a difficult one to find at the old Ma.gnolia, and you say that the new one is little more than a re-release of the old, so I'll conclude that you just removed it.

This leaves Ma.gnolia with much the same feature set - and thus, now serving the same market - as Simpy, with a few significant differences. Simpy is easy to log into - enter id, enter password, click and proceed. With Ma.gnolia, now that you've eliminated the option of logging directly into the site, one must instead go to Verisign or some other OpenID provider, log in there - and then, at least in the case of Verisign, log into Ma.gnolia using the same window! Having attempted this in Chrome, because your login doesn't work in IE - the choice of 80% of those surfing the Internet - I found that Verisign kept logging me out in Chrome. One is left needing two accounts instead of one, just to log in, and maybe the need to set up more, as one tries to find which browsers have been ignored by Ma.gnolia, and which by the partners with whom we're forced to deal, if we wish to enter our accounts, at all.

Simpy offers a button that one can put on one's toolbar, allowing one to use it with far greater ease than one can use Ma.gnolia. Oh - and Simpy has never lost its users' data.

In Ma.gnolia's favor, one does find a much prettier interface, and easier to read text, but in a Simpy vs. Ma.gnolia competition, will that be enough to make many people choose Ma.gnolia? Count the number of truly ugly and highly successful social networking sites out there - I think that you know that the answer to that question will be "no". Yet, go up to the average Simpy user, and ask him to give you an honest, instead of a tactful answer to a simple question - when was the last time you used your Simpy account?

Some contrarian or another will probably write in to say "I use mine every day, and so do lots of other people" - but take a look at the Simpy homepage. One sees little other than spam. Simpy has become the virtual equivalent of a trash strewn vacant lot, still alive only because its creator seems to love it, and doesn't have the heart to get rid of it. Conclusion: In a head to head competition with a known failure, Ma.gnolia would come out the loser.




As a prospective returning user of your service, how should I view this? Ma.gnolia doesn't have much to offer me at this point. Yes, it still has groups, but of the discussion-free simpy variety; bookmarks are pooled, but no opportunity for public interaction with the other users is to be found. To use a group like that isn't community building, it is parallel play - pointless. So let's pretend that the feature doesn't even exist, for the moment, because it might as well not.

This leaves us with the forced one paragraph per review format, which leaves Ma.gnolia, functionally, on a level with the far more reliable and well funded Delicious, and considerably behind Faves - which, by the way, also offers a toolbar. Nobody is going to get excited, other than the usual few yes men, because everybody will have better, more competitive, and more reliable places to be.

Let's say that I'm one of the few people who disregards this, and continues. What happens to me when Ma.gnolia folds? If I'm lucky, I'll get advance notice. If I've built up a real presence there, this will leave me spending the next few days in the most tedious possible way, moving bookmarks by hand. If I'm unlucky, I lose my work. Again.

This doesn't sound like a very good deal to me, and even if I were inclined to overlook that and plow on ahead, I'd be left with this thought - everybody else has just had the same thought, or will, soon enough. Even if I disregard my own best interests in order to be altruistic on behalf of a total stranger, what are the odds that enough people will make the same choice to keep your company alive and my work from going to waste? In this case, the generous odd man out gets badly hurt by his generosity, a thought that should deter most people from being charitable in that manner. Think of it as a variant on the Prisoner's Dilemma.

If this sounds cynical - Larry, what have you done to earn our charity? The downgrading of that feature set wasn't an act of G-d, it was a choice, one that you made, that set in place the perverse incentives that promise to keep your company from recovering unless, to put it bluntly, you succeed in finding yourself a bumper crop of idiots, or unless you have a lot of favors to call in. Maybe about 10,000 of them. Choices have consequences, and they should, when they're informed ones, freely made.

If you don't care enough about us to give us better choices than these, ones that don't involve us climbing out onto a creaking limb and hoping for the best - why should we care about you? As for the idiots - I don't doubt that you'll find a few, because they're always there, but for how long are people going to want to read what they have to write, or want to follow their links?

But it's your choice."




Me, today: "I'm going to unsubscribe from this group, now, and put my Ma.gnolia account and groups into mothballs. React to that fact, however you wish, even if that should mean killing my account. As it is, my account is nothing, and I refuse to be upset by the thought of losing nothing.

If, at some point, you decide that you'd like to start treating your job like a job and make Ma.gnolia into a place worth using, send me a message. I'll see it, eventually, and might even care enough to log back into Ma.gnolia. Until then, I have stuff to do."






End of discussion, at least so far and yes, I did unsubscribe, once again feeling a little foolish for having defended a provider. I'll talk more about that, later.

A number of us really wanted to give this guy a break. I'd even started writing a pep talk, thinking (after Ma.gnolia's reappearance almost failed to appear before the end of summer) that Halff needed a little encouragement, when what he really needed was a good, hard rhetorical kick in the posterior. He just doesn't seem to care about the people who rely on him, and that's just wrong.

Rebuttal to some Yelp Bashing

Note: I've deleted a small amount of profanity that was present in the material I've quoted, replacing it with roughly synonymous nonprofanity in parantheses, because I've decided to move toward making my own pages a little more family friendly. No profanity softening was present in the original text.

I posted the following response to this article, posted under the title "Yanked Off Yelpers: How To (Urinate) Off Your Most Passionate Users in 7 Days or Less", in which the author (Sarah Browne) wonders out loud ... read it for yourself.

"Everybody (and rightfully so) is ready to jump through hoops to keep their Loyal Customers purringly happy. Everybody that is, except Yelp. SFGate reports that the online review site yanked ‘an undisclosed number of accounts after finding that the business owners had swapped positive reviews with other business owners. Yelp also regularly deletes reviews it believes are phony. The move sparked an outcry among local businesses, and has even led some entrepreneurs to band together with thoughts of a class-action lawsuit. Their reasoning is, if they legitimately spend their money and patronize a service, why can’t they review it?” Because they're gaming the site? So, we have support for those who filed a nuisance suit in order to bully a free service into letting them use that service, in a misleading manner, posting ad copy as if it were a series of spontaneous testimonials. As is all too often the case online, the word "fraud" is the first one to come to mind, and continues to be as we come across the reply written by "Brian Smith", to which I attempted to reply, myself: "If you write a negative review on yelp on there site, you will be banned. So much for freedom of speech." Pardon me - bull. Let's take a look at the review page for Yelp on Yelp: http://www.yelp.com/biz/yelp-san-francisco#hrid:TkMMI0BVBb9we_Dr3cvXMQ We find this review, dated May 5 of this year, from Rick G: "yelp (slurps). They delete what anyone flags. without question. no contaction the author to question the review. just a message to tell you someone flagged it and its gone. thanks for your hard work but its not needed. don't get creative; but stay within the small minded guide lines that only a hillbilly could comprehend. you (slurp)!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i used it', are you going to delete this. or will you flag it and then send me a email telling its been deleted already. you don't appreciate my work i don't appreciate yours." Doesn't sound very positive, does it? Yet Rick G.'s profile is still up http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=cmbLhf-Jrq_fIxxlSWO8zA I guess these censorious mods need more than four months to oppress their users? One might note that it hasn't been updated since that review, which could mean that Rick walked off in a huff, or his account was locked. "It must be the latter", somebody might write. Yet, if we take a look at this comment from Mashimaro M, who gave Yelp one star "Often times, it seems that if you are a "PAID SPONSOR" you get the special treatment and if not, well, good luck for your business because you will be at the mercy of Yelp's selective listings. That's not what I call a "fair and unbiased" forum for reviews." and go to his profile http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=JNeqH3WpciaKrVZiy0hu6w we find that he has posted reviews as recently as last week - even though his one star review also was posted on the fifth. So, I'm guessing that more four months are needed by the operatives of the evil Yelp empire to silence their users? I wonder how much more. Let's go back more than a year, to when Sarah Y. posted these kind words in her one star review: "Yup, judging from the other reviews and lots of PM's in my inbox, Yelp is definitely on the decline. When things grow, they die. Yelp now sides with the business owners who can pay to have negative reviews removed. Wonder why your review doesn't show up in the search? What a joke. Ultimately, GOOD FOR THEM, they're trying to make money. The users are just unpaid peons doing all the grunt work. ;-) You can't fool people forever, Yelp." Yet her profile and review remain in place http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=zD1T8JFx3O1Rf9aNu49rpQ and looking at the former, we find her last active on February 26 of this year. But these all come after Mr. Smith posted his remarks. Perhaps Yelp used to be ever so sinister, and has since cleaned up its act? Fine, let's go back to January 25 of 2008, well before Brian posted, when Jobby J. wrote "Too many secret handshaking (sphincters)." and also gave Yelp one star. Looking at his profile http://www.yelp.com/user_details?userid=5-JGKdS4zpoz7SpxnACPKg we find that he was posting just last month. Conclusion: Smith's claims would not seem to be supported by the facts, but that won't matter, because most people won't take the time to do what I just did. As for why the Yelp staff won't let their "most passionate reviewers" post ad copy on what is supposed to be a review site, maybe I'll let that one comment on itself.

The keyword, perhaps, is "attempted" - that reply has not, as of the time of this writing, yet appeared on Ms.Browne's blog. Let's see if it ever does.

Vox.com / How does one add a photo to a group?

Yes, it's a general question, but looking in the help center, I found nothing very helpful, and I've already burned away more than an hour on this nonsense. Honestly, I'm starting to get a little angry. This should be a straightforward function on Vox, and it isn't. Should I post this to ... where?

I'm in a group I've just created, and see a notice that the group has no photos, as one would expect. Would I like to add one? Sure. Go to your library and add one, I'm told, being given a link to my own library. I go there, find an image, click on "share" and find absolutely no option for sharing the photo to a group.

Fine. Is there some other option? I go back, and look at the page I was on before I went to that remarkably useless share page, which seems designed more to help promote Vox than to help the user - note that all of the options given involve the posting of content outside of Vox. Is there anything useful there?

Apparently not. As I watch a morning that I had intended to walk out into start to turn into an afternoon, I finally get around to trying the edit screen

and find what I'm looking for at last. What I've found is that the Yelp system won't provide us with an option to add photos to a group if one clicks on "photos" instead of on "edit", on one's main screen - and I was supposed to know this, how? I was just supposed to know it, that was all. OH! – and look at all of the beautiful red x’s (exes?) that posting these screenshots have left on my main blog page on Vox, where those last two links are to be found.

Though an easy solution to this problem could be found ...

... at which point everything return to normal, or at least to what passed for normality.

The customary act of a user, at this point, is to post some self-deprecating remark about how the service needs to understand how stupid its users are, and work with that, but I'm not going to write anything like that, because this is simply absurd. There is a difference between being intelligent and being psychic.

How, precisely, was the user supposed to know that Vox would set its system in such a way as to disable the sending of photos to groups, unless one reached the photo using just the right path, and how would one know which path to take? Once one is there, one should be there, and free to do what needs doing, whether one has found the right sequence of hoops to jump through or not.

This is what Vox really needs to work on - making its system more intuitive, more user friendly, and better documented. Creating a help group, instead of sending users to wade through a mass of documents, and having an employee watch that group, might not be a bad idea, either.

Mirrored: Here, on "Party of One"

Future Policy Question: No cell phone = must leave blogger? / Posted to Blogger Feedback

Note: This is a question about a possible change in policy that, should it really be coming, one would do well to act on well in advance of its adoption. If you are not a Google employee, please do not try to answer it. Your guesses might be interesting, but nobody can really speak for Google but Google.

Here we go: First of all, a policy change that went in toward the end of last month - to get a new gmail account, one must have a cell phone that allows one to receive text messages. See:

http://freewareelite.wordpress.com/2009/07/31/gmail-now-requiring-cell-phone-number/

If one does not have a cell phone, Google suggests that one find a friend who has a cell phone, who, one must assume, doesn't want a gmail account of his own and is willing to let one use his cellphone for these purposes. Good luck finding one of those, especially given the circumstances which I'll mention in a few paragraphs.

Quoting the post:

"Until recently, GMail has been IMHO the best web-based free email on the planet, because of it’s quickness and ease-of-use. However, starting yesterday, new GMail users from the USA have been required to supply their cell phone numbers in order to create an account.

This means that your mobile phone is going to be spammed?! Why does Google want to do this? They say that this requirement will spread to new users outside the US soon, and later to all GMail users."

which would imply that those of us who have gmail accounts, but not cell phones that they own or can borrow, will lose access to their gmail accounts at that point. Pretty bad already if one was relying on that gmail account and gets surprised, but it gets worse.

Last night, a friend of mine tried to create a new Google account for a non-Google address, and ran head on into a notice that he had to provide that mobile phone number, with text messaging capability, because Gmail required it - even though he was not, at that point, trying to set up a Gmail account! Just a standard Google account, one of those things that lets one post to Googlegroups under one's non-Google email address and, most significantly here, lets one log into and post to Blogger.

Which leaves us with the question - when we lose access to our Gmail Accounts, at some time in the unspecified but apparently not very distant future, will we also lose access to all other Google services that we have to log into to use, including Blogger? I ask, because my main personal blog is currently located on Blogger, and if I'm going to have to move it elsewhere, I'd like to begin that process as soon as possible, for reasons all too familiar to anybody who was around for the Yahoo 360 fiasco. Also, I had been thinking of making fairly extensive use of a few more of Google's services, especially the Knol feature, which I was going to use to start posting some mathematics related material - I find the offerings of material above the sophomore year undergraduate level to be surprisingly limited online - but obviously, if I'm about to get locked out of this account, devoting much time to building up a presence here won't make much sense. That would be like laying bricks as the wrecking ball came into sight - severely bad craziness.

I mentioned a reluctance that friends might feel over lending one their cell phones for this purpose. Let's take a look at this post to see one reason of why that might be:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/gmail_advertising/3319645.htm

"Gmail trying to access my cell phone logs

Here is a strange occurrence... I installed Gmail and maps onto my Blackberry phone which I have high security settings on. 15 min later I get a pop up stating that Gmail was trying to access my phone logs. Does anyone know what Google would want with our cell phone history logs?"

Not exactly a moment that builds a large amount of trust in the company. Cell phone numbers are generally considered to be private information. To help me in this way, my friends, if they had cell phones - and few of them do - would have to breach their own privacy, leaving them open to telemarketing calls and the possibility that a company that they don't really know might try to put that information to inappropriate use. That would be a lot for me to ask of them, and I wouldn't blame them one bit for saying "no", because I would seem to be asking it of them very lightly, if I were to ask them to help me through this new procedure.

As for getting a cell phone of one's own, if one is doing that just to hold onto one's Gmail address, that will have become one very expensive "free" email account, even when the Blogger membership is thrown in as a fringe benefit. At that rate, one could get one's own domain name, run Wordpress on it, get a paid email account, and skip the cell phone - getting more functionality, more customer support and more security, at a much lower cost. Why would the user choose to pay more to get less, as he would be doing here if a cell phone was something that he just wasn't that interested in having, which, at over $50 / month, is far, far more expensive than some of our Internet connections? Especially since, under the cell phone powered option, he has apparently opted in to telemarketing calls (see comments following post behind the first link).

So, is it time for me to start packing and looking for a new online home?

Please get rid of nofollow / posted to Diigo community forum

I just edited an old post on a group, and noticed that Diigo has jumped onto the bandwagon and started adding rel=nofollow to all outbound links in its groups. Guys, please stop doing that.

The standard argument for using nofollow is that its use deters spammers, even if the rate of spammage would seem to have increased since the introduction of nofollow. This belief can easily be seen to be nonsense by anybody who has ever waited for one of his sites to appear in the search engines listings. Why? Because that process can take months, sometimes even years, and spam sites don’t tend to live that long. Within weeks of a site being so promoted, sometimes even within days, complaints about the spam will have gone in to the service hosting the site and to the site’s registrar by the truckload, and the site will be gone. Only to be replaced by a brand new site at a brand new location, selling the same old stuff, as anybody who, out of perverse curiosity, has ever clicked on a link on a semi-old spam message (and then checked his newer e-mail) almost certainly has seen for himself.

Spammers work by getting large numbers of visitors to go to throwaway sites that won’t live long enough to rise in the search engine ratings, so pagerank won’t matter to them. Logically, it shouldn’t, and if we take a look at spammer behavior following the introduction of nofollow, we find no evidence whatsoever that it does. It can, however, matter immensely to those who are trying to establish a web presence for themselves honestly, by doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing, that which the search engines are supposed to be encouraging them to do – by creating and posting content that people want to read and link to. Let’s say that one of us posts content to a “black hole”, a site that (like Diigo) has rel-nofollowed all outbound links, including the homepage links on our profiles. (Check it out – Diigo has done this). Let us say that somebody looks at the content, likes the content, and links to it. Diigo gets a search engine boost, but the person who took the time and did the work to create that content doesn’t. Meaning that his other sites would have done better in the search engines if he had posted that content elsewhere, where nofollow wasn’t being used.

In effect, he is being penalised for having chosen Diigo (or some other black hole) as the place where he would post his content. Nofollow hurts the legitimate poster, while having absolutely no direct impact on the spammer. But it can have an indirect impact, as one can see by looking at services like Simpy, where the spam has taken over.

Think of the difference between being the one guy who’s speeding while everybody else is staying below the limit, and being that same guy when everybody else is doing 85, too. You’re still breaking the rules, and you still know that (theoretically) you can be slapped down for that, but there’s a great feeling of safety in numbers. As the ratio of spam to legitimate content goes up, the spammers get bolder and more aggressive, as anybody who has ever been away from a forum he moderated for a little too long knows – spam tends to snowball, and probably for the same reason that the number of speeders will start to soar after a point; because one’s chances of being one of the people grabbed and sanctioned are dropping. The life expectancy of one’s spam is rising, and the profitability of it is doing likewise in the process, a thought that will lure more spammers in to take advantage of this opportunity.

There’s the indirect impact on the spammers – by undercutting the incentive given to one’s legitimate contributors, one helps create a friendlier environment for those spammers, which perhaps is why the rate of spammage has gone up since the introduction of nofollow. The law of unintended consequences has kicked in with a vengeance, and why wouldn’t it? If somebody, in “real life” (offline) decides to treat all of his visitors as if they were scofflaws, hardly anybody is surprised when he eventually finds himself surrounded by nothing but scofflaws; honest men expect to be treated with respect. Why should life work any differently online? Because treating us all like we’re spammers, even after we’ve proved that we’re not through months or years of honest posting, isn’t even remotely respectful. Even if it is fashionable.

Yes, I know that dealing with spammers can be exhausting, and I’m sure that one will be greatly tempted to believe that a shortcut can be found to doing that tedious, emotionally unrewarding task, much the same way as some of us would like to believe that we can find a fun way of getting around the need to do cleanup in the lab, or that’s there’s some diet that allows one to lose weight and reduce one’s cholesterol while eating all of the steak, bacon and chocolate one wants, maybe by nibbling a few acai berries or something like that. But reality is what it is, and it either gets dealt with on its own terms, or it gets worse. Sometimes, a lot worse.

One doesn’t win popularity points by reminding people of this, but it is the truth.

Yahoo 360 moving is almost done

Those last few posts, which (as I've said) were the last few I posted to my old Yahoo 360 blog (the precursor to "Monday Never Comes") as the preface to a story I'll tell ... later. I want to get outside.

I will predict that very few people will be pleased with what they'll end up reading. While I will concede that Yahoo's actions are causing a lot of trouble for a lot of users, I won't agree that Yahoo is completely to blame for their difficulties. Note the date on those last few posts, which I've moved to this blog (instead of to Monday Never Comes) - as early as 2007, the signs of what was to come were unmistakable, and some of us had the sense to act on them. That's about the time I copied my 360 posts over to Blogger.

It's now 2009, Yahoo 360 will be closing in a few weeks, and what have the remaining users been doing? For over 1 1/2 years, they've been pleading with Yahoo to please not do this, calling the Yahoo staff fools for not keeping 360 alive, and sometimes copping an attitude with those who suggested moving on, calling on those present to adopt a "wait and see" attitude - in other words, wait for the river to start flooding before piling up the sandbags. Now comes closing time. I'm going to suffer a little, because I'll lose a few links that I can't update - mostly in posts to guestbooks I left back in 2007 - but the search engines have already found my new place. I should be in generally good shape.

Our wait and see crowd, on the other hand, has some frantic downloading to do, followed by years of trying to get into Google. If you saw my old place, toward the end, you saw the links atop the old posts, leading to their counterparts on my new blog. The spiders had 1 1/2 years to find those links, and Google had 1 1/2 years to respond to the find and accept that, yes, this was the new location of my blog. Somebody who followed that wait and see strategy over the last few years, today, will have to hope that the same will happen for him in under two weeks. He's going to get hurt. But the fact of the matter is that he will have been hurt by his own fully informed, stupid choices, and that's the kindest spin I can honestly put on the situation.

If one continues to stand in the middle of the street because somebody in a position of power tells one to do so, and one wants to kiss authority's backside, just how much sympathy should one expect to get when one gets run down by a car? People did this to themselves, and as unkind as this may sound to some, I think the blogging community will be a little stronger for their misfortune.

New Technorati Claim Post / Originally Posted to Yahoo 360

"This post claim is purely a matter of telling a little personal history, my telling anybody who is curious about such things where the original location of Monday Never Comes was; I have no current plans to make further use of this blog. The very fact that this journal's relocation to Blogger predates its' current name should be reason enough; this relocation has been a done deed for so long that that my blog has established an identity for itself over on another company's diskspace. To the extent that anybody has heard of my blog, they are far likelier to have heard of my 360 blog by having encountered my place at Blogger than the reverse. My counter at 360 has slowed to a crawl, and any return on my part to 360 would now be the kind of disruptive site relocation of which I've written, undertaken for no clear purpose.

If you would like to see more blog posts from me, you can find them through either my Mashable.com or Technorati Profile, though you'll probably do better with the former, as a few locations (eg. Tribe, Livespaces) have proved unclaimable on Technorati. I can also be found at The Abyss on StumbleUpon. See you over there."

Note: The blog I spoke of in this post (first seen Monday, May 19 2008 at 3:34 pm Chicago time) was my 360 blog, not "Mostly Evil", the blog you're reading right now, which I intended to keep going indefinitely.

The post you never expected to see (#35) / Originally Posted to Yahoo 360

Looking at the comments on that last Yahoo 360 post, made so very long ago, I do believe we've discovered the secret of perpetual motion. The darned thing just will not stop.

For anybody thinking of joining in on the Hatefest, as I've said before, let's try to understand the circumstances, circumstances that we didn't know about at the time this all began. Yahoo is on the verge of very possibly being gulped down by just about the biggest fish in this virtual pond of ours: Microsoft. Hostile takeovers, usually achieved through leveraged buyouts, have historically tended to be followed by massive job cuts. If your thought right now is "why won't they fix this or that", part of the answer might be that a lot of people may be doing their darndest to line up alternative jobs, just in case the worst happens, and can one blame them? To lose one's job in hard times and join the ranks of the long term unemployed can often be the end of one's career.

To lose one's blog is upsetting, but to lose one's career is a life altering event. At this time, without necessarily taking any sides in a corporate battle, I hope we would be willing to consider the possibility of putting our thoughts about companies and their failings and merits aside for a second, and reminding ourselves that there are real flesh and blood human beings on the other side of that screen right now, people who have to ask that uncomfortable question "what will happen to me". Right now, they have a lot more to worry about than we do, and I hope, at the very least, they would get our understanding. By all means, back up your work elsewhere, that's something that some of the current complainers should have been doing back in November, but let's keep a little perspective. If the Antichrist has stepped foot on Earth, let us seriously doubt that he is maintaining an office in Sunnyvale, and take some of the rhetoric down just a notch.

Please.

Followups: this post over on Multiply, and this post, originally found on the Yahoo 360 version of Monday Never Comes. This post was originally published on 360 on Tuesday April 29, 2008 at 9:47pm.

Relocation has begun / Originally Posted to Yahoo 360

I've already begun moving most of the material on this blog to its new location at Blogger, discussing the matter in this post at the new location.

The short form is: Yahoo 360 is shutting down, Yahoo's plans for relocating the blog posts found on this service are vague and not terribly reassuring, so I took matters into my own hands and created a new copy of this place over at Blogger. I'll do a few screenshots of the old place (here), probably eventually replace almost all of the posts you currently see here with links to the new locations, and then use whatever this journal morphs into - if anything - in a greatly rethought and even more greatly diminished manner.

Added note: I also have a new place at Multiply. If you were looking for Liz or Malice in Wonderland, they're among my contacts over there.

First Posted to 360 on Monday, October 22, 2007 at 11:50 pm, following the post "Shifting emphasis over to other blog, maybe temporarily" and followed by this post.

Mostly Evil? / Originally Posted to Wordpress

As I started to write on what was going to be the main page for the companion site for this blog, before I discovering that Freewebsites' FTP server had broken down ...

"As I will explain on the companion blog for this site,

ie. where you are, presently

"the title of this page has nothing to do with any depravity of my own of which you might happen to be aware. It is a reference to the Google corporate motto "don't be evil", which I read to mean "don't create any unnecessary hardships for the visitors or users" - something that should have been seen a platitude, had circumstances not made it a radical statement. Providers do make life pointlessly hard for their users with fair frequency, as I've discovered the hard way, often enough to see that a website was to be found in those many hours of pointless aggravation. Having been one of those geeks who really did wade through 50 or more pages of legalese at a sitting, only to discover that he had to start the process all over again after finding a deal breaker in the fine print, I had the thought that others might see some value in not having to go through that nonsense themselves, when looking for a blog or a website hosting service, or other online resource.

Yes, Irony happens. I was about to post those words on a server rendered inaccessible by the owner's decision to turn off the permissions needed for uploading, leaving some of us to wonder if we need to find new hosts for our websites. I hope this is just an oversight, because Spanno (the sysop at Freewebsites) has been very cool in his support of free expression, but a site I can't get into isn't going to do me much good.

"Pointlessly hard", you ask. Yes, indeed. When diskspace goes for under 1/4 cent per Meg, and a provider has hidden a clause in its TOS saying that its users sites will be deleted unless they log in once per month, forever, that's exceedingly pointless. One meg is about 66 pages worth of text. Think of how much work would go into writing 20 meg worth of text - that would be 1320 pages worth - and imagine all of that work being destroyed in order to save 5 cents worth of diskspace. Is it any wonder that interest in free webspace has been dropping off over the last few years?

That's the point I'm trying to make with the name of this blog and its companion site - the philosophical issues that arise when we talk about the policy issues at a lot of these companies aren't particularly deep. We aren't looking at anything that couldn't be worked out with a little common sense and common decency, and occasionally a little basic maintenance. The people who you will see criticised in these posts really should have known better - and I would argue, usually did know better.

Let us consider the case of a photographer, on a site to be named later, who having found that her work wasn't only being plagiarised, but resold commercially at a high profit, posted a protest of this fact on her space, was attacked in the vilest terms in the comment section of her post, and found that her provider responded to this by censoring her remarks! After a massive groundswell of anger in response to this incident, the provider posted an apology, admitting that it had fouled up. "See, they care", some said, to which my response would be "about what?". Does one really need to be screamed at en masse to know that punishing somebody for being attacked on behalf of a thief is grossly unjust? If one waits until after the screaming reaches a crescendo to back off, is one trying to be fair, or is one just trying not to be yelled at?

The question answers itself, doesn't it?



This blog will be mirrored elsewhere - probably at Livejournal and definitely in my own personal records - so if you're reading this site and have decided to engage in plug pulling because you don't like the way your company has been portrayed - however honestly - don't even try. Notice the distributed format of my current website. Experience has taught me how to deal with those who play games like that.

From this point onward, this blog - wherever it should be - is where I'll be discussing all Internet service related issues, redirecting the discussion from Monday Never Comes and the Abyss, both of which were being watered down and sidetracked by the addition of this kind of material which, while of some practical significance, is intellectually and creatively unenriching and not really what I want either blog to be about; if I start talking about personal drama in the middle of explaining a mathematical proof or discussing a political issue, you might hear the drama, but you probably won't hear much of anything else, or at least won't enjoy doing so.

I don't believe that Wordpress will censor this blog, but if they do, and you've been following it (and would like to continue doing so) just go to my homelist at Yahoo or homegroup on Google (see links to the right) and you should be able, in relatively short order, to find your way to the new location, because there will be one.

I hope that covers everything for now, but it is early summer and I'm in my usual hurry to get out the door. More later, written far better and more clearly than this probably was.

Return to Your Ring

When this blog belongs to a few rings, this is where some of the code will go. That's assuming that it ever will belong to any of its own. At present, Mostly Evil gets its webring traffic from the Abyss, so if you wish to return to your ring, you should go here.