chaos theory

What to do with all those orange knit hats...

Sat, 07 Feb 2004 14:17:07 GMT

Is this the shape of things to come? :

There's a point in there somewhere...

Sat, 07 Feb 2004 04:46:55 GMT

In between his insults and vented spleen, James A. C. Joyce makes two legitimate points over on the Kuro5hin.org site entitled "Why your Moveable Type blog must die": Movable Type is badly designed.Movable Type is written by web designers, not programmers. It looks good, but unfortunately falls apart under the slightest touch. There are scripts out there which can automatically hammer your blog into tiny, tiny bits by someone with a room-temperature IQ and just a few keystrokes of effort. Movable Type's bad design makes it easier to DoS you.Every time you post a new item or someone posts a new comment, Movable Type spawns a little instance of perl. It then zips through and builds a new static page from the dynamic data since it's now changed. This process consumes your server's processor power. Movable Type's search feature in particular seems to be a processor hog for some reason. In addition to this, most of you have email notification on new comments turned on. If (when) someone crapfloods you or decides to flood you with searches, you might be lucky enough to get 100, 300 or maybe even 10,000 emails in your inbox. If you're not so lucky, the server which runs your blog will crash and/or your hosting company will go apeshit. This is one of the reasons I've been somewhat leery about the server-side blog technology of MT and Blosxom. Nevermind that my MT test weblogs are so lightly trafficked that the comment spam outweighs the actual comments by a five-to-one margin. Blosxom's main advantage is that it is full-time (and really lightweight) cgi; I like Radio Userland for the static rendering and desktop content management. MT is the worst of both worlds in some respects. Sure, it's great to have integrated trackbacks and comment management. But despite what some have said, a Web browser is not the ideal writing environment. And with the other technologies readily available to us, It's come to the point that we mostly use MT in this house as a mechanism for my wife to upload pictures to show on her LiveJournal weblog. I've listened to both sides of the "comments suck"/"comments are essential" argument of weblogging. I've said before that I think comments and trackbacks are an important part of making weblogs conversational. And, honestly, I could give a flying fsk about what trackbacks do to Google. But when the same people who click on e-mail enclosures have their own (three-releases-behind, security-hole-riddled) Moveable Type weblogs running on their $20-a-month ISP dialup account that they share with their roommate or mom, there's a lot of fodder out there for people like Joyce to make a case with. Comment spam alone is a major reason why I'm considering rolling everything back to either Blosxom or Radio; there's no easy tool available to deal with MT comment spam or even bulk-change comment status for older posts with. And then, there's the drivel factor. "Why don't these people just get on a BBS?" a friend asked me by IM earlier this evening. "Don't they know they're just talking to a wall?" Well, some of them like it that way. But some lives really are better left unexamined and undocumented, thank you. And if they must document them, then maybe they should stick with something safe--like Blogger or LiveJournal. Personally, I like LiveJournal for what it is--a blog-based social networking service. I can post stuff there I would never post in the clear here, because I wouldn't want anybody but my trusted friends to read it. And I think LiveJournal is in a way the wave of the future--more and more blogs, wikis and the like are going to move behind some sort of gated community server to keep the noise-to-signal ration from becoming unbearable. This sort of leads back into what the potential of something like Orkut is. Google could link Blogger to Orkut, and you could have a locked-down blog only available to friends and friends-of-a-friend.

Day 6 of the Orkut Invite Hostage Crisis

Sat, 07 Feb 2004 04:00:41 GMT

After Craig Newmark took pity on me and invited me into the Orkut fold, I summarily fired off five invites to some of my more technically inclined friends (and to my wife, of course) to join up. However, none of those invitations have arrived in anyone's e-mail inbox yet. No reply on this from Orkut tech support, but I suspect that they've shut off invites again as they fix bugs. One, a bug that affected the Safari browser (karmic ratings of friends didn't stick after the page was closed) got fixed by a Safari update on Mac OS X 10.3. But I'm sure there's a passle more to deal with. Meanwhile, one message I got from a FOAF broadcast on Orkut: "Is Orkut over? Does anybody have a copy of Tetris?" Certainly, the crowd has been slow to get things moving in the communities, where the members of communities outnumber the posts generally by a 5-to-1 margin. After all the stories I've seen going on and on about Orkut's "addictiveness", maybe some of these people got their wrists slapped at work for abusing web privileges and are just lurking now. Or maybe they're all just waiting for the right song to come on to get out there and dance.

Ryze Above the Spam (or, an adventure in social multilevel network marketing)

Fri, 06 Feb 2004 21:00:40 GMT

So, I signed up for Ryze, yet another social networking site, today. And almost instantaneously, the alerts informing me of new messages in my "guestbook" began. Aside from one guy who made a knowing reference to my old blog tagline ("lowering the quality of web content daily"--maybe he just googled me before hitting my guest book), most of the sudden attention appeared purely random. It was I had pulled into town at the same time as an Amway convention. I quickly figured out what was going on. At the bottom of each user's Ryze home page, there's the "Newest Members" list, and then there's the "Most Active Member Pages" list. As soon as my profile was complete, it got added to the list of "most recent members" --the equivalent of blood in an shark tank. What happens is that people sit and watch the new members list, and go and post on the guest books of new members, who in turn follow the links back to their pages to figure out who this person warmly welcoming them to Ryze is. The more they do that, the more active their home page is, and if they do it enough they work their way onto the Most Active list...which appears on everyone's home page. As a result, the first impression of Ryze is that it feels like the Meeting at the Holiday Inn in the Prestige Conference Room of social networks, filled with people selling holiday timeshares, diet packages and nutritional supplements. Maybe it's because the place is so blatantly about business (after all, it's subtitled "Business Networking"). There are plenty of people who are engaged in things other than multilevel marketing on the network (well, ; Simon's on Ryze, and some people might think he's doing multilevel marketing for Linux these days). In any case, after getting about 9 e-mails in the first hour alerting me to new postings to my guest book, I quickly put the kabosh on that feature. Has anyone else had a similar experience with Ryze? Has anyone derived any actual business value from it yet? Let me know. Or you can leave a comment in my guest book on Ryze.

Social networkware-- the missing links

Thu, 05 Feb 2004 21:54:11 GMT

After a few days of banging around on Orkut, and a bit more time on the other players (I just got on LinkedIn, and will be looking at Ryze shortly), I have a couple of observations. First of all, the networking piece in itself--creating a "network" of contacts based on who you say you trust, or is your "friend"--is a good thing in theory. But if a friend, or a friend of your friend is not as discriminating as you are, then there's no guarantee that the the network is really "trusted". While Orkut's rating sytem and testimonials are a step toward solving that problem, you've got to remember that depending on how promiscuous your friends are, you may only be three degrees away from Gollum. Secondly, there's a big missed opportunity in terms of managing identity, presence and content here. I'd like to see what my "friends" think is important today, and potentially engage them in conversation about it if they're available. Orkut offers a spot for instant messaging screen names in profiles, but it doesn't offer a way to create a journal (or a news feed) of things of interest that you might want to share with friends. As far as presence goes, Tribe already has something that senses when members are online. But what these sites really need is a kindler, gentler instant messaging (IM) integrated into them--they need to facilitate live discussions between and among members, while offering you a way to gently refuse requests to chat when you're feeling antisocial. There's an opportunity to integrate with a major IM player here, or even offer some sort of a bridge technology that exploits the fact that you have user authentication and a way to filter identity already in hand. The next step is shared files and such--friends could set up an online, er, "listening party" for a new album, for example. There are some obvious business applications for things like this; they could become a source of revenue for the outfit that implements them on top of their social network. As far as content goes, all of the current social networks fall short. Orkut, for example, doesn't offer a way to keep track of discussions going on inside communities within Orkut while you're offline, save for relaying messages to the community by e-mail. Tribe allows for the creation of e-mail digests of discussions. Either way, it means more spam--there's no way for you to screen content before getting it dumped on you while you're offline. The obvious solution to this problem would be a permission-based RSS feed--you could browse summaries from an RSS reader or some other client, and click on things of interest to take you straight to the entry online. Of course, those are steps that can only be taken once the bugs are out of the works. For now, I'd just like my join-up invitations to friends to go out reliably. And that may turn out to be the biggest issue for the social networking sites--scaling up to meet demand. The eventual answer is probably a distributed approach. It is "networking", after all. One thing that Orkut et al should consider--leveraging RSS, web services and integration with some sort of instant messaging architecture could improve the overall scalability of their sites. Maybe offloading some of the work to the client would help? Google has already done some work in that space (with its toolbar add-ons for some browsers); maybe Orkut and its competitors could learn something from it as well. A Mozilla extension? A Java applet? Maybe the impetus should come from the outside. Someone like Groove, for example, or some other P2P play. Maybe the answer is an SDK that lets developers build client apps that allow some synchronization and offline use of the data from these communities. Or maybe I've been doing too much tech-crack. I dunno.

Sun Spots

Thu, 05 Feb 2004 18:52:11 GMT

After seven years of mistaken identity, today The Baltimore Sun is changing the name of its website from SunSpot.net to baltimoresun.com. The paper originally chose a .net domain because it thought--not understanding the online biz very well--that it might become an Internet service provider. Well, they've finally completely corrected that error in judgement. What the heck. The Sun has been pretty progressive about supporting webloggers and RSS readers; it recently renewed its RSS feeds, with a host of subdivisions of content. But this is more indicative of the renewed business savvy at the Sun (now under the control of the Chicago Tribune Company) than a revolution in the way they do online journalism. When it first launched SunSpot, the Sun's management made a decision to carve it off from the newsroom and make it a non-union shop. As a result, the Sun's print journalists were forbidden by union and management rules from writing anything strictly for online. A collection of underpaid freelancers (including my beautiful wife and, as one editor once said to me, "kids with nose rings" were brought in to fill in the neighborhood guides and online features. Most of the production of original content for online has ceased, as far as I can tell. Maybe the name change is indicative of a bigger shift now that the Trib Company is in charge (and has won some concessions from the editorial staff in contract negotiations through extreme hard-ball tactics). Or maybe it's just a name change. We'll see.

Zoe turns 3 today

Thu, 05 Feb 2004 17:11:26 GMT

A year ago, Dave Winer posted her picture, linked to my entry on that day, and celebrated the joys of childhood: "It's great to be a kid because they don't have to pretend they're not crazy, like adults do, if you know what I mean." No kiddin', Dave. Ah, the joy of a life without inhibitions. Zoë is free to pretend whatever she wants; to be a ballerina ("It's time for my dance recital," she says), a super hero ("Daddy, can you put on my cape so I can be a super powers?"), or she can recruit her brothers and lead a band of scurvy pirates, bandannas and all ("Arrr, Daddy, we're hunting for buried treasure!"). She's a clothes-horse in training, with a vast supply of dress-up clothes and a well-developed sense of style. She can be as demanding, or as dainty, or as demure as she wants to be. But usually, she's just in charge. That's Zoë -- She Who Must Be Obeyed. At three. Look out, world.