McFarlane Prize
Nominate your favorite Australian web site for the McFarlane Prize for "excellence in web design by Australian web developers." Nigel McFarlane did a lot to make web sites work better. My favorite article was this Greasemonkey tutorial.
Wed, 14 Jun 2006Absence of stand-out bloggers?
Does Google have an absence of stand-out bloggers, as Doc mentions? I don't know about anybody else, but I've learned more about Google from reading Matt Cutts than from anything else. But, really, being a blog-connected company by having your own bloggers on the payroll is like being a cat person by clawing up your own couch and crapping in a litter box. It's a start, but if you really want to scale, just start putting out 50-pound sacks of cat food and letting stray cats into your house. Google puts out cat food and the bloggers come running.
Thu, 08 Jun 2006Canadian Wiki Blog Conspiracy Exposed
Sacha's wiki/blog
integrates a to-do list and
calendar. Evan's wiki/blog
does CSS styling for microformats,
such as little hearts next to link
rev="vote-for" links. Joey's wiki/blog
relies on Subversion or Git to store your pages
and history. Elisp, Scheme, Perl.
Goodbye scripts
Goodbye scripts are the open relays of comment spam.
The basic idea is pretty simple. Somebody wants to get a log of which links people followed to leave a site, so you just write a script that does a redirect, and then make all the off-site links on the site point to the script with a query string of the off-site URL instead of straight to the off-site URL. Google does something similar in their results pages, with a little JavaScript to hide it.
The simplest goodbye script goes something like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl
print "Location: $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'}\n\n";
Please don't put that on your web server, though. I'll explain. You can do something similar with mod_rewrite, too. I think it's...
RewriteRule ^/goodbye/(.*) $1 [R]
...but my mod_rewrite rules never work the first time, so it's something, but not that. Another way to do it is with a meta tag in a regular HTML page, like so:
<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="5; url=http://www.example.com">
One .gov site has this one:
http://www.example.gov/cgi-bin/goodbye
...and if you stick a ? and a URL at the end of that, it'll send you anywhere. No, I'm not going to put a link in here to show off that I can make a .gov site send you to naughtypoopoo.com. And no, I'm not going to put in which .gov site it is (although I will send their webmaster some mail.) You get the idea. And if you're a comment spammer, you got it a while ago. Go around to people's blogs and post links to goodbye scripts on perfectly respectable sites, and let those sites redirect humans or bots to your spam site, and not get filtered out.
Whee. Time to go around and make sure you check HTTP_REFERER in any goodbye scripts you have installed.
People invent communications technology. Assholes spam it. People filter it. Repeat. Isn't this fun?
Fri, 12 May 2006Firefox banner
(Updated to include link to "hacking" article and MSDN page. Original posting date: 17 April 2005)
Dave Shea points out in an article that there's an easier way to do this kind of thing.
How do you put a big Firefox banner on your site for users of a certain broken proprietary browser—without annoying people who already have Mozilla, Firefox, Konqueror, or some other standards-compliant browser? Take advantage of a bug in MSIE's CSS support. Put this in the stylesheet:
body > div.hide {
display: none;
}
then put the banner and any other browser-related message in a div with class="hide" that's not inside any other element. As long as MSIE doesn't support > you can have all kinds of fun with this.
Share Your OPML
Fun social networking site: Share Your OPML. Yes, I'm going through to check for stuff that people who read my stuff also read, and to weed out more popular stuff from my subscriptions to cut down on the groupthink/"yawn, seen it" factor. A bas le A list!
Greetz to my readers. Someone who reads this site also read Cute Overload. That's...well...interesting.
Thu, 13 Apr 2006Fun with prediction markets
Google launched Calendar and launched me into the top 5% of players on the Yahoo/O'Reilly Buzz Game. I am but a worker in the hive mind.
It would be fun to see the IT media using prediction markets as sources more, and flackalysts less.
Tue, 28 Mar 2006THAT Brian Connolly?
(updated: thought of another reason, the press list. Updated again: added link.)
Mike Krempasky wonders if the person behind Strumpette is really Brian Connolly of literatigroup dot com.
I talked to Brian Connolly on the phone when he threatened to sue some free software users over a copyright beef between himself and a contractor, and Connolly is not Strumpette.
(1) anyone who does that kind of clumsy legal threat without thinking it through is unlikely to have had any experience of the PR profession.
(2) even if the person did go with the clumsy legal threat, anyone with real PR experience would have a list of good media people to pitch about it, and wouldn't have had to borrow Blake Stowell's list.
Connolly is too clueless about PR to be Strumpette himself.
(via Doc)
Robert French talked to Brian Connolly too. Wed, 22 Mar 2006Comments
Comments just turned on, thanks to the "writeback" plugin from Rael Dornfest.
Mon, 20 Mar 2006On Web 2.0, application uses YOU!
Most of what separates Web 2.0 from pre-Web 2.0 is not really about the web. Paul Graham writes that Web 2.0 is about three things: AJAX, Democracy, and Don't Maltreat Users. "Democracy" here means using users to collect decision-making information, such as evaluating whether something is worth reading or buying, for other users. Yes, visitors come to your site to get value that other users brought to it. Ka-ching!
Tim O'Reilly writes that Web 2.0 is about constantly improving software that's available as a service; mixing data from multiple sources, including users; offering your own data and services in a flexible, mixable way; and "going beyond the page metaphor" (which sounds like "AJAX" to me.)
Anyway, the key part of being Web 2.0 is that you're building value from many small information contributions that users don't mind making. Every user whitewashes a little bit of the fence. Paul Graham points out that Google is a good example of this. When I say great burritos in San Francisco, Google uses my link-making work (and that of others) to amass awesome burrito (and other thing)-recommending power and rule the world. And I like it because I want my favorite San Francisco burrito place to succeed.
When people put geographical directions up using microformats, someone will crawl them and string the route decisions together to get a directions search engine with common sense (because it borrowed the common sense of millions of users) that doesn't tell people to make an illegal left into oncoming traffic, the way a certain map site used to tell me to leave my old house every day. (70mph combined speed motor vehicle slalom! Yaaaaahooooo!)
Where AJAX fits into all this is that you're snarfing one reputation information unit per click, quickly, instead of waiting for a whole page to render to suck the value out of the user's head into your MySQL cluster where it becomes valuable. And you have to let users pull data back out and mix it, since that creates attention incentives for other users to push data in.
So far this Web 2.0 stuff sounds like it's all about web sites. How can companies that aren't basically web sites or mail-order catalogs be Web 2.0? Some already are. Remixed FedEx lately? Download their sample code and try their API.
Hold on a second—you don't have to be a FedEx "partner" to do that? No, and that's the first concrete difference between Web 2.0 and non-Web-2.0 companies. From a pre-2.0 point of view, the partner program is what enables companies to interact with you. Start thinking 2.0, though, and the partner program looks more and more like pointless bureaucracy that keeps non-"partner" companies out. Just as you want Googlebot to crawl your product pages, (and some of you will go flame Matt Cutts if it doesn't) you want any company whose stuff can plug into yours to try your API.
You could probably do a pretty reliable Web-2.0-or-not-o-meter based on dates in the RSS feed for API announcements vs. dates in press releases matching /partner/i.
What next? Larry Augustin points out that sales and marketing accounts for 82 percent of new software license revenue. Ouch! Let's throw some Web 2.0 magic at that number. And I don't mean the sales part. The web, together with open source licensing, easy-to-demo ASP, and virtualization, is already taking a huge chunk out of the sales side.
But a huge, expensive part of software marketing is involved in information gathering, too. It's really expensive to hire Software Marketing people to gather requirements from users, write big word processor documents full of what the users want, and show each other Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, then tie up the developers showing them again.
Within organizations, we know all about using Extreme Programming and other "agile" methodologies that replace the obsolete-as-soon-as-finished overdocumented "waterfall" development process. But often, as soon as projects cross organizational lines, we're back to the kind of thing that with-it software people rightly make fun of.
Where web sites are concerned, Web 2.0 took the excellent idea of "APIs" from software developers and gave them to the webmasters. In off-web businesses, it's taking development methodologies from the developers and giving them to marketing people.
But how do you know what to build when the Big Dumb Word Processor Document of What To Build is gone? This is where it gets fun. The customers are already telling you what they want, if you know how to listen to them. Web 2.0 companies are concentrating on building the place for that conversation to take place, instead of writing the damn document themselves. You get better, faster, cheaper when you lose the waterfall.
After all, some users will sit still for Focus Groups and other 20th-century marketing, but even if they do, you're stuck dealing with the resulting data yourself. Canonical Ltd. takes the specification process where Google takes the search result ranking process—outside the company as much as possible. That doesn't mean that random users design Canonical's products for it, any more than search engine spammers define Google results. But in Web 2.0 you get the users to whitewash the fence.
There's some overlap between being a "Web 2.0" company and being an "open source" one. Here's where I think Web 2.0 goes further than open source. If open source is trees, Web 2.0 is hemp. Instead of harvesting big particpation from a committed developer, tester, user, partner, or customer, you get a small quantity of fiber per transaction, fast, and you do a lot of them.
I think there's a limit to how far pure conversationality and social software can take this, and that we're going to have to get hairier information-sucking-a-little-bit-at-a-time-from-peoples-heads tools such as prediction markets. But Web 2.0 "unplugged" from the web can take us a lot further, faster, than the alternatives can, and, especially in the crisis-beset area of business software, companies are already using it.
Fri, 17 Mar 2006Hey kids! Easy sitemap script!
Try sitemap-o-matic to build Sitemaps for Google.
Why this is good for lazy webmasters:
- No command-line options to learn: just pass it one or more URLs.
- It really crawls using HTTP: no mapping filesystem paths to URL paths, and gets all your dynamic content.
- Nothing to edit in the script itself so you can use one copy for as many virtual hosts as you want.
- Stick changefreq and priority in meta tags and they show up in the sitemap.
- CPAN Purity test results: 98.59% pure CPAN code.
Anyway, works for me; comments please mail me.
hCard
Here, hCard crawlers! Come and get it! Soooooeeeee!
(Yes, I just added an hCard to this page.)
Thu, 15 Dec 2005JavaScript Hash Cash
Hey kids! Prior Art! Great idea, and it looks like it's working, but I'm wondering...if you run the JavaScript once, you get four hours to spam like a madman. I'm thinking about something like this for a simpler form-based site, but without encrypting the JavaScript itself. The form would have hidden fields containing a string A and a length L, and the JavaScript would run until it finds a string B whose hash matches the hash of A in the first L bits. Then you could turn up L until the script runs within the length it takes a user to type a thoughtful comment on a slow machine, and of course on the server side only accept the form submit if B passes the test. Go back to the form again and you get a new A.
(To make this extra leet, I should find a hash function whose implementation in JavaScript runs not too much slower than some future spamware's implementation in C.)
Fri, 09 Dec 2005Google Analytics and saving the media we need
Programs such as Google Analytics and AdSense Referrals show that Google is already starting to offer advertisers and publishers a better deal in the text ad market.
Looking at it from the content site point of view, this smells like something that could totally change the media business, or maybe I should say finish the change in the media business that the web started.
How about this for a future: in order to run a content site you don't need an ad sales force, you just need Google. You don't need a marketing department or reader surveys, you just need Google. Or whichever one of the text ad vendors is giving you the best combination of money and tools today. Probably Google, since they don't have cash cows outside the text ad business to protect, but that's another story.
This could be an incredible hollowing out of the media business. The "business side" is getting the same Silicon Valley Make Your Job Obsolete Magic from Google that typesetting and pasteup got from Atex, Adobe, and Apple.
The only problem is, it has to work. Some kinds of media can fail and we won't miss them. Other kinds of media aren't allowed to fail.
For example, the daily newspaper is as important a link in the information chain as the clerk at the courthouse who makes copies of legal documents for you. We have a First Amendment right to do independent journalism not because it's important for someone to have the right to do journalism, but because it's important for people to actually do it.
Fortunately, we have a way to tell if media disintermediation is going to work. Find people who are way ahead of the curve, and watch them. If you're interested in making disintermediated media succeed, help them. So here are some point people, canaries in the coal mine, pioneers, whatever you want to call them.
1. Jonathan Corbet: Extra services are nice, but Google is eventually going to have to make with the cash to keep its AdSense sites happy, and keep them from straying off to Microsoft or Yahoo. If the Text Ad Wars work right, LWN will do well. But if an A-list content site such as LWN isn't seeing enough revenue to do the Google-based content business model, that's a warning sign.
2. Dan Gillmor: The daily newspaper business model is falling apart, but the political role of the daily newspaper is more important than ever. If the great Bayosphere experiment to save local journalism doesn't make it, we're in trouble.
3. John Buckman: It's easy to say that the music business is hopelessly broken and that it's time to start over, but actually doing it is another matter. Making musicians happy with download, CD, and license revenues is, in the long run, the freedom-loving Web's most powerful defense against calls for recartelization.
Tue, 06 Dec 2005Blog to Congress
(updated 6 Dec 2005: fixed HTML mistakes in the Blosxom flavour, changed link to point to new version. Thanks to Michal Migurski for the HTML sanity check.
More "blog to Congress" discussion from smallbrain.net, Ruby Sinreich, and Doc Searls. Are we a Movement yet?)
Original date: Wed, 14 Jul 2004
It's a familiar complaint. "You web weenies blog until your hands fall off from carpal tunnel syndrome, but when it's time to write a letter to Congress, you don't have the time or you're all elbows with the word processor."
Well, it's time to stop that sorry situation right now. Here's a Blosxom flavour to turn any Blosxom entry into a letter to the appropriate member of Congress. Preview, print, and stick it in an envelope. Thank you.
By the way, the digital TV transition, combined with the DMCA, threatens to extinguish political free speech as we know it. Have a nice day.
Tue, 13 Sep 2005Is Marketing Sleazy?
Bob Bly asks, Is Marketing Sleazy?
Not necessarily, but when mass media grows faster and cheaper than reputation systems, sleazy isn't adequately selected against. The tide is turning against sleazy, though.
1. Craft marketing (Middle Ages - 1920s) Manufacturing and information technology are both very expensive. Products are made and sold largely on a one-to-one basis. Reputation systems work, because they're in people's heads.
2. Mass marketing (1920s - 1970s) Price of manufacturing drops only for large quantities of identical goods. Information technology is very expensive, too expensive for merchant to track individual customers. Surveys. Sales reports. Advertising. Reputation systems have to use mass media tools and organizational structures themselves to reach people -- Consumers Union founded 1936.
3. Database marketing (1980s - 1990s) Price of manufacturing drops further; mass customization possible. Information technology prices fall to the point where it is cost-effective for merchants to track individual customers. Catalogs. Direct mail. Telemarketing. Individualized magazine advertisements. Reputation systems clobbered by overwhelming product diversity and micro-targeting.
4. Reputation marketing (2000 - ?) Information technology prices fall enough for customers to establish their own systems for comparing merchants. Web discussion systems. Micro product review sites and independent purchase preference correlation search engines. Amazon's business model: product recommendations. Sleazy marketers beware: your prospect's next Google search will find the blog of the last person you burned, or even a dedicated debunking site.
I saw this happen last weekend. Someone watched an infomercial for the Landrider bicycle, and was practically sold—until doing a Google search and finding some comments on bike forums.
So, Bob, it's not whether or not marketing is sleazy. It's that different combinations of media costs and available technology give different balances of power between the sleazy marketer and the "mark".
Improving the population
I have raised the average intelligence of the entire human population of the planet by not installing the Macromedia Flash plugin, and thereby making every dumb company who let some expensive agency bamboozle them into paying for a Flash site disappear.
You're welcome.
Fri, 09 Sep 2005Zimbra
Zimbra is groovy. Follow the "hosted demo" link from the Zimbra home page. A little more layout folderol than you'd like to see in your daily mail tool, but AJAX-licious. Anyway, check it out.
Mon, 22 Aug 2005Name of this page
Why is my personal web space called "free live nude Linux warez chat"?
It was a search engine thing. In the bad old days, search engines used to put a lot of faith in your page title and meta tags.
Things I was sort of right about in 1998...
Yes, messing around with meta tags went away, but now there's a whole new generation of search engine games. At least today's common-sense search engine optimization now rewards you for putting up content that people actually want to read.
Thu, 18 Aug 2005Matt Cutts
Matt Cutts is the Google engineer who met with the Mountain View, California Xenu Independent Study Group when we marched on Google. He has a new site, Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO, up. (thanks to Chris DiBona for the link) If you know or care what "SEO" is, you should probably subscribe.
--
Don Marti
<dmarti@zgp.org>
