Blogging

Mob turns on Google

It seems the lynch mob after Google this morning over this result. It seems that if you search for "She Invented" in Google it returns "Did you mean He Invented?" at the top of the results. Of course with little research many are running off suggesting this is some kind of evil, anti-feminine plot. In reality it has far more to do with how Google spell check works. As that page points out when you search for "United Stats" it asks if you meant "United States". It isn't that "United Stats" has a mis-spelled word but rather that most people who search for "United Stats" modify their search to "United States". This brings up the question of how many searches one would have to do to game the system. Imagine what could be done with searches for "bad companies" and having "Did you mean our main competitor" pop up. Maybe that's the next step in search engine optimization/marketing -- blackhat version.

I'll be back

I will be returning here on a more regular basis next week. Plans were to try and do it today but DirecWay has a new Fair Access Policy and thinks I've used too much bandwidth while being gone the last week. Exciting updates to come when the technical problems are overcome.

Ten years of Scripting News

One week from today is the tenth anniversary of Dave Winer's blog, Scripting News. A post today says he has nothing special planned but to post ideas. Scripting News is one of the early blogs on the net. It pre-dates the term blog and its longer ancestor weblog. The groundbreaking way paved by Winer's Frontier software led to many things that today would be called blogs. One early project I started was RamLine which by today's standards would likely be considered a multi-author blog (and would be organized differently than it was).

Pseudo viral networks replace web rings

In the early days of the web and the start of the page rank notion links from other sites was the goal. Web rings sprang up like grass in spring and one could find a web ring for lopsided pine trees on the south side of the house. As this happened web users soon realized these networks weren't all that useful for finding information. At the same time the amount of information on the web was blossoming and users time became ever more scarce.

This is all a long way of starting to talk about what is happening here. The site purports to be building a listing of the "100 most prolific bloggers". The thing is the bar is set so very low (1000 posts) that most anybody who has blogged for any length of time would be in the list. Apparently no attention has been paid to the top bloggers. How many posts make up this blog? I'm not sure Dave Winer even knows but it is certainly one heck of a lot more than the 40,000 listed at the top of the aforementioned page.

The ultimate question is what does it matter? Is a prolific blogger somehow better than a non-prolific blogger? What does making more posts really represent? In many cases it represents a lot of pretty poor writing without anything of much interest being said. Most readers would rather have a few well written stories than volumes of the poorly researched and poorly written things that fill up some blogs when the goal is "how many times can I post today".

Ecto Test Post

You can safely ignore this test post. It is a means of testing the Ecto weblog editor.

Back on the air

After a brief break to do some real world renovation I'll be back to writing a bit more frequently here. There are many things to cover from the George Strait concert last weekend to some great updates in web tools and the promised review of the Logitech Laser Desktop 530 (short version I love it, by the way). And with the SPAM module working pretty well comments won't be moderated anymore.

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