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).

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced Friday that it is terminating RegisterFly's accreditation as a domain name registrar.  I've written previously about problemswithRegisterFly.According to ICANN's site "between now and 31 March RegisterFly is required to unlock and provide all necessary Authinfo codes to allow domain name transfers to occur. Any and all registrants wishing to transfer away from
RegisterFly during this period should be allowed to do so efficiently and expeditiously. "

A recent lawsuit between the two shareholders of RegisterFly brought many questions to the fore about the company's financial situation. One is left with the impression that the IRS will have a lot of work to do sorting this thing out. That being said a judge recently awarded control of the company to Kevin Medina who was recently ousted as an employee by the board. In ICANN's March 8th update on the RegisterFly situation the company said "ICANN has demanded that RegisterFly immediately act to provide authorization codes and has also demanded a meeting with RegisterFly (and other relevant parties that are assisting ICANN) to resolve RegisterFly's reported failures."

I'm a little leery of recommending domain name registrars these days but will say I've had great success for the last couple of years with GoDaddy. Bob Parsons, Go Daddy's CEO, offers that they will help the RegisterFly refugees. To take advantage of the offier RegisterFly customers should visit https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/transfers/registerfly.asp.

ICANN says that at a meeting next week it will be discussing "the reform of the Accreditation policy and process." The proverbial cow has left the barn and ICANN is looking to close the door. While the move will be too little too late for those caught in the RegisterFly trap. One hopes that most of the RegisterFly victims will be made whole and that ICANN will make a provision for more closely examining companies' applications for accreditation. In RegisterFly's case the problems were evident long before the company earned ICANN accreditation.

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".