internet on a whole minute

I want to apologize for all the people who ever took the time to comment on my blog. I just approved your comments – because I just discovered they existed. I somehow assumed my blog software would magically notify me when I received comments. Of course it never did. I figured either a) it’s really really hard to attract comments, or b) my software is broken somehow. So if you’re wondering why I’m such a jerk, I’m sorry. Thank you for taking the time to comment.

The Internet and the technical community are host to a toxic culture. This culture allows and even encourages personal attacks, threats, and misogyny. This week, Kathy Sierra’s experience with death threats forced it into the public discourse. There is of course no excuse for the behavior of the individuals who harrassed and threatened her. Yet they are only part of the problem. The solution rests not in finding, stopping, and punishing them (or helping them, for surely they are sad or sick) – although that is to be hoped for, it may be unlikely here and certainly is for the majority of such cases. It rests with others who give permission to such behavior – permission to hate. …

Yesterday I attended Moosecamp at the Northern Voice blogging conference. Highlights for a couple of sessions follow (selected simply because these are the ones for which I have the most notes). I’m afraid I don’t know the names of most who spoke, so can’t credit them. …

I just attended a session about microformats at Northern Voice. Following an explanation about what, there were a great deal of questions about why – and I don’t think they found the answers compelling. Let me explain why I am excited about microformats. …

Tim Bray has proposed a micropayment system to combat spam. A central authority – he suggests the post office – would issue “stamps” for perhaps $0.01. Then, each email message, blog post, etc. would have to prove that it had been paid for by a stamp. This low cost, he suggests, would have little effect on most people, but would be fatal to spammers. I am an admirer of Tim’s blog, but I think he’s dead wrong: this is one of the worst ideas I’ve seen in some time¹. There are two main problems, revolving around cost & access, and centralization & innovation. …

Syndication feeds (RSS and Atom) provide precise information: the title of each entry, the author, when it was created, when it was modified, a unique identifier for the post, the content of the post without any surrounding menus, graphics, advertising, etc. This metadata supports many of the features of aggregators and blog search tools. But there’s a problem: the entries in a feed don’t last. Without a standard way to represent the information in HTML, it is lost to the Web. As far as I know, no such standard exists. ...

Proponents like to say that blogs are conversations. And they are: many have comments; many posts link to others and those links are discoverable through blog search engines. I want to see threaded blog-reading software. Because compared to the conversations going on in email, or in discussion forums going back to the heyday of Usenet or Fidonet and BBSes in the 1980s, blogs hardly qualify. ...

The New York Times announced today that they intend to start charging for online content. In my recent study of blogs, I found that linking to mainstream media stories was extremely common; quoting them even more so. If these results are representative, then it seems to me that blogs are serving as a new distribution channel for the media. If that’s true, then the Times is doing exactly the wrong thing. ...

Today I noticed that two of the places I visit frequently – Creative Commons and RPG.net – have new wikis. Blogs are taking over from personal homepages. This is the time to turn the Web from a collection of sites into something bigger. …

I would be surprised if what I’m proposing hasn’t been done, but I haven’t found it anywhere. Web forums are often full of useful information, but it isn’t organized. It would be great if it was easy to pull the best posts out of the forum and plug them into a more organized repository, like a wiki. Here’s what I envision. . . .

If we want to eliminate spam, we should attack the market, not the medium. Andy Lester argues that content filtering is a counterproductive failure which diverts efforts from a real solution. I think he is mistaken. . . .

Google’s new nofollow attribute for links will hopefully reduce comment and trackback spam on blogs. Defeating spam is essential. But reading Tim Bray’s blog, I see that there may be a cost. . . .

I suspect that with thought, other information can be leveraged to remedy many of the weaknesses with folksonomies. Let me explain what I mean. . . .

I’ve been reading Lawrence Lessig’s excellent Free Culture. I first worried about copyright nearly ten years ago, and I have become increasingly disturbed. His vision of a soviet future of controlled culture terrifies me. There should be marches in the streets and activists on the steps of the VAG. But there aren’t: few understand how important this is. There must be a way for us to use our strengths to our advantage. Can we leverage the net and everyone on it who cares in a way that’s unambiguous to our politicians? I have an idea, but there’s a piece missing. Perhaps someone can help me. . . .