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.