Thursday, July 2, 2009

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.