Today's Comment on the Mybloglog Product Blog

I'll be posting this to the Yahoo developer blog, right after I get done proofreading it, in response to their "Mybloglog?" post. Yes, that's its title, and the question mark seems fitting. My comment:

"Is it, indeed, closing down?"

Today, it doesn't seem to be, but somebody does seem to want to kill it. Remember what we saw out of Yahoo, prior to the closing of Yahoo 360? The way basic maintenance was neglected and problem reports were responded to with nothing but handholding form letters? Take a look at Mybloglog, today. Go to the Mybloglog suggestion board, and take a look at the spam

http://suggestions.yahoo.com/?prop=mybloglog

One user in particular, who calls himself "Ajay", has been flooding the board with spam for months. I've reported this. No action, not even a response has followed.

Try creating a community on Mybloglog, as I did last night. Once again, we're seeing the eternal "refresh pending" - one goes to the "settings" page for the new community, which still doesn't have a screenshot, and finds that one can't upload a screenshot of one's own -

Screenshot    not available   (refresh pending)

It's almost noon, here in Chicago, and I'm still getting the refresh pending message. I wrote to Support, last night, which shouldn't have had any difficulty solving this problem, because Tilly told us what was going wrong, last year, when this problem arose



http://getsatisfaction.com/mybloglog/
topics/refresh_picture_pending_for_over_two_day_now

"Oops! Sorry about that, totally my bad. Before I left for the weekend I accidentally unplugged the screenshot robot. *blush* Its back up and running now, you should be all jet set :)"

But this year, the Mybloglog team just couldn't be bothered. All I got back from "Cid" was one of Yahoo's form letters

"Hello,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! MyBlogLog.

I apologize for the trouble you're having with updating your MyBlogLog community screenshot. I realize how frustrating this must be.

This is a known issue and our Engineering Team is working to resolve it. If you have any additional questions or concerns please let us know as soon as possible.

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! MyBlogLog.

Regards,



Cid

Yahoo! MyBlogLog Customer Care

Mybloglog General Tech T1"

I responded to Cid, providing a link to Tilly's post, and here we are on the next day, and no movement has followed. The plan seems to be to let the service fall apart so badly that people give up on using it. That way, instead of having to deal with a huge, public outcry all at once, Yahoo whittles down the user base gradually, so that only an ignorably small group is voicing its discontent at any one time. What we end up seeing is the offering of deliberately bad service as a corporate strategy.

Mybloglog seems to work best as an update notification service. My advice would be to start offering Feedburner as an alternative for those wishing to subscribe to one's blog. No, one can't use Feedburner to tie all of one's content together. Feedburner is definitely not as cool as Mybloglog was before Yahoo started fouling it up, doing to it as it seems determined to do to all of its acquisitions. But Feedburner is a lot likelier to be around two years from now.

Oh - and Mr.Yeh, if you're reading this ... I remember that cute little thing you did with the comment editing a few months ago, and will be cutting and pasting my comment, as is, to my blog. If you try doing the same thing again, don't think that you'll be fooling anybody.





Note: After I posted this, I saw this message:

"Your comment has been received. To protect against malicious comments, I have enabled a feature that allows your comments to be held for approval the first time you post a comment. I'll approve your comment when convenient; there is no need to re-post your comment."

One might note that on the very same post, one finds a comment from "Alex Afdhal" that is nothing more than an advertisement for his travel service. So, apparently spam is OK, but honest criticism is not, in Mr.Yeh's world.

Playing Favorites? / Repost from Chicago Photography

Note: I am mirroring this post of mine on the Chicago Photography group on Flickr, just in case the staff should decide to respond to criticism with censorship.



Some of you might have noticed that the same photograph by Kymberly Janisch has graced the homepage for this group for some time, and maybe wondered if that was fair. Shouldn't I rotate that image some more, and maybe give a little added exposure for the other members of the group, as well?

In fact, that was my plan, originally, back during one winter day, when I took a look at that photo, and noticed how much I loved in and thought it captured the mood of that season. I decided that in each season, I'd look for one photo in the pool that captured that moment from my point of view, and ask for permission to feature it. But then Flickr surprised some of the owners of the groups on its system with a sudden policy change.

In what the company was said to be an effort to combat spam, Flickr started attaching "rel=no follow" tags to all outbound links from group descriptions, irreversibly. A number of owners were quite upset by this surprise. At the time, I did write in to Flickr support, and ask if, perhaps, the nofollow tags could be set to fall off after a reasonable amount of time had passed since the last revision. If the concern was spam, surely this would leave the problem addressed, because one would assume that spam groups would be tracked down and deleted before the tags fell off? Say, have the tags fall off after a few months, so the policy wouldn't end up hurting the honest users of Flickr along with the spammers?

The suggestion fell on deaf ears. I didn't even get a response. The owner of another group who made me aware of this problem (by publicly reporting what had just happened to his group) certainly saw no sympathy from the staff member who responded. So the policy is as it is, something that Flickr just isn't going to budge on or be reasoned with, about. One just has to build it into one's plans.

Were I to replace the photo, the outbound links to the rings to which this group belongs, and the ring homepage, would instantly get nofollowed. That would certainly not be fair to the other members of the rings which bring this group a share of its traffic, as those members would lose pagerank. The group's homepage on 8m.com would instantly be hurt in the search engine rankings, and some years of experience in dealing with these matters tells me that before long, this group would be harmed in the process.

So, certain choices that I wouldn't have otherwise made, now become mandatory. The link to my global ring return page rotted when Geocities went out of business. I'd like to fix that, but I can't, so we have a dead link that's going to stay dead. One of the rings I submitted this ring to, just before the policy change, turns out to have been abandoned. I'd like to stop feeding hits into a ring that isn't reciprocating, but I can't, not if I don't want to undercut this ring's ranking, and the traffic of each of the members of this group, in the process. I could add other examples, graphics on other groups I run that now look malformed because Flickr changed how code was interpreted by its system in a highly non-intuitive way, right before the policy change, but I think that you get the point - the change has tied my hands.

Somebody will probably ask me if I've explained this to Flickr management. The answer is no, because after I explained a very similar problem right after they started slapping nofollows onto the outbound links from profiles, the staff member with whom I was talking responded by slapping nofollows on all of the links on the profile for the Flickr account I was writing from, seeming to think that this solved the problem. "See, it's a done deed, so you don't need to worry about the damage any more. You're stuck with it." Kind of like having somebody drive in for repairs, express his worry that his car might suffer from rust damage if he drives around in the string rains too much, and then finding that the mechanic on duty has responded to this concern by having his car dropped into Lake Michigan.

If I wrote to Flickr management, expressing my concerns, I don't doubt that I'd get the exact same kind of "help", all over again. "And if that happens, then you'll start fixing all of that stuff that you'd like to fix?", somebody might ask. Answer: no. I don't believe in rewarding bad behavior. In the short run, doing so might serve our best interests, but in the long run, it sends a terrible message, and willful sabotage is atrocious behavior under any reasonable standard.

We, as users, can't change bad policies when they're this far along, because whatever those policies might be about in the beginning, eventually they're about the staff having the satisfaction of winning a test of wills with its users. Something that, as I said, one has to factor into one's plans. But at least one can take a stand and express one's dissatisfaction in a firm manner. If enough users and group owners do that, then the next time somebody in management comes up with a half baked notion, maybe he'll look back on the last fiasco and back off from that idea, before the rest of us even know he thought of it, and before getting stubborn about it becomes a matter of saving face.

One can always hope.




That having been said, having Ms. Janisch's very lovely image as a permanent feature instead of a temporary one, however unintentional, is hardly the worst part of this outcome. As frustrating as this was, things could have easily turned out far worse. The artist could have deleted the image from her stream, leaving us with a red x in the description that I'd have no good way of fixing. I could have missed that post and edited the group description after the change. 8m.com could have gone out of business. None of this happened.

And let's hope at least that much good luck continues.

Mybloglog closure and Yahoo's blog - a little subtler than the usual sleaze?

Let's start by repeating what I posted to the Yahoo developer network blog in response to the mention of the possibility of Mybloglog being closed by Yahoo, because nobody quite saw it on that blog, other than me:

"Mr.Yeh, let me tell you how this looks from a user's point of view. I've just invested a certain amount of time into creating communities for my blogs, linking to them, and encouraging visitors to sign up for them, if they wish to be notified of updates. That's time out of my day that doesn't get paid for by Yahoo with anything other than a service that you're now telling us might get shut down really not very long after I've taken time to link everything together, meaning that my time might very well end up having gone to waste.

How does that make this user feel? REALLY ANGRY. Betrayed. And totally unwilling to ever try another Yahoo service if you go ahead with this, no matter what that service might be, because I'm tired of this garbage. How much of my uncompensated time got eaten up this summer because your ever so delightfully whimsical CEO decided to kill Geocities, leaving us to scramble looking for replacements, because ... tee hee hee ... Yahoo decided that an FTP server was one of those luxuries its users didn't need, meaning that we had to do our downloading by hand, one file at a time? But hey, who cares? It's not like our time is worth anything, right?

Except maybe to us. You know, those lowly users without whom Yahoo would have no content onto which to stick its advertising, outside of a few newsfeeds one can pick up elsewhere. Seriously, if all that you people are going to offer in the long run is AP feeds, then why wouldn't visitors just go to the AP homepage or to some real news site? Why bother with Yahoo?

My own personal position - and I really, seriously doubt that it will be a unique one among your user base - is that I'm really tired of having my time put to waste because your company feels like flaking out, so tired that if you do this to us one more time - as you say you might be about to - I will never submit another piece of content to another page on your server ever again, outside of those I or one of my friends moderate, and that I'll start pushing to have those moved elsewhere. Enough is enough. Yahoo is either going to choose to be a credible hosting service or it is not.

If not, you're going to end up with the user base you deserve, and your stock prices will reflect the change, especially after some of us write to a few of your investors and explain to them why the quality and quantity of the content on those servers has started to drop, and why advertisers are wandering off. I hope that wasn't too vague. If it was, be sure to send a message to the corporate acquisitions office at Microsoft, and I'm sure they'll be able to explain it to you.

Posted by: Joseph Dunphy at December 26, 2009 3:02 AM

I posted, and then looked at the blog the next day, and instead of this passage

"so tired that if you do this to us one more time - as you say you might be about to - I will never submit another piece of content to another page on your server ever again"

saw this passage

"so tired that if you do this to us one more time - as you say you be about to - I will never submit another piece of content to another page on your server ever again"

It's subtle - nothing more than the removal of a single word - but this is enough to create the illusion that I don't know how to conjugate the verb "to be" ... which I do, by the way



I am
you are
he, she, it is
we are
they are



Aside from the political convenience of having an angry critic appear to be illiterate, which anybody who has been following my blogs will know that I am not, this simple deletion of a single word takes a comment about something that Yahoo's staff has said that it might do, and transforms it into something that contains a clearly inaccurate statement about something that said staff has said that it will do, an inaccuracy that can be seen for what it is, merely by reading the page. This is a very effective way of quietly smearing somebody who has expressed some very reasonable anger.

Yes, a little subtler than the usual Yahoo managerial response, that of simply deleting the remark and sending a threatening message, subtle enough that even I found myself wondering if I had just done a poor job of proofreading. Over a week passed without my being able to clarify anything, because any attempt on my part to post produced an error message stating that I had posted too many times, already, even though I had only posted to that blog one time, that I could remember. I believe that this was the first time that I had ever posted a comment on that blog, but I could be mistaken.

Finally, I was able to reply to this comment

I agree MBL had some potential, but it's been neglected for years. It doesn't really DO anything. Sure, the stats are solid, but the rest is just pointless. Communities you can't even post in? Ever heard of CMF Ads? They have a great forum. BlogCatalog has a better widget. Even BC has forums. The MBL widget is just another script to dump in your sidebar and forget about.

writing

"It doesn't really DO anything."

Sure it does. It ties all of one's content, no matter where one has posted it, into one tidy, easy to follow bundle. It provides an easy way for users to be notified of new posts in the locations which they find to be of interest.

"The MBL widget is just another script to dump in your sidebar and forget about."

Which is what I think it should be - a convenient, labor saving tool that does what it is supposed to do, with a minimum of effort and drama for the user. Not everything needs to be a chance for somebody to post. If I wanted my blog to have a guestbook, I could easily give it one. What I don't like about Blogcatalog, among other things, is that using it effectively forces me to give my blog a guestbook, one without comment screening, whether I want one or not.

Posted by: Joseph Dunphy at January 14, 2010 1:23 PM

Again, my comment was mangled, so quickly in this case that automatic machiniery had to have been involved. This time I had carefully proofread, triple checking my work - this was no typo. What I had written is not what appeared, and I immediately had a question

Is there some kind of weird swear word screening program in use on this page? I ask, because I typed"It ties all of o n e ' s content, no matter where o n e has posted it"

(spaces introduced by me in an attempt to prevent a repeat of what just happened) and got

"It ties all of o n e ' s content, no matter where be has posted it,"

That's not cool, and this is not the first time I've found myself unpleasantly surprised in this manner, on this very page. What o n e types is what should end up being seen by those reading o n e ' s comment.

Posted by: Joseph Dunphy at January 14, 2010 1:49 PM

I must say, though, that if this is an accident, it's a strangely convenient one, one that looks a little too well designed. If one wishes to argue that Yeh has a right to keep my remarks from appearing on his blog, I will actually be quite supportive of that argument, but to post a distorted version of what a respondent wrote and attribute it to him is defamatory, absolutely underhanded behavior. I could not even credit it with what, under these circumstances, would be the faint virtue of originality, because I've seen this game played before, by a school newspaper editor intent on punishing a candidate in a student government election for having written a harsh rebuttal to a previous editorial, meaning that I am not even compensated for my aggravation by being left with a halfway decent story to tell after the fact.

Programming a virtual booby trap into one's system to do one's dirty work for one, wouldn't lift such conduct to a higher moral plane.