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Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Sitemeter Via Steven's post on site tracking, I found out that Sitemeter was tracking rather more than it really should (use of spyware cookies and all that). This is a shame, as I really loved some things about Sitemeter, and none of the alternatives were able to approach the simple and useful reporting Sitemeter provided. I was particularly fond of their Visitor Detail page (note, that's a link to a screenshot, not Sitemeter), which contains a good summary of a visitor, where they came from, where they went on my site, and other standard info (OS, browser, location, etc...). They only tracked the last 100 visitors, but that was plenty good enough for me, and the service served me well for the past 9 years or so. Still, they had frequent downtimes, and they've done very little to improve the service over the past 9 years, so I've always kept an eye open for alternatives. None of the popular services have ever really satisfied me though. Now comes this news of spyware, which is just a crappy situation, and so I've decided to remove all instances of Sitemeter from my site. This is most frustrating and I'm not happy with the situation. I've removed it from all blog pages as well as my main page. The rest of the site will have to wait a bit while I breath some life into my crappy, antiquated XSLT content management scheme (hopefully this will be completed by this weekend). I've been playing around with Google Analytics for a bit, but they don't provide the kind of detail that I want for individual visits (though they're great for collecting general stats). I just installed StatCounter, which kinda, sorta has a page similar to the visit detail page from Sitemeter. But we'll have to see how that works out. I've heard good things about Mint, and I've heard that they have a plugin/extension/whatever-they-call-it that approximates Sitemeter's visit detail page. However, Mint actually costs money (imagine that!) and I don't want to pay for something that I'm not even sure will work for me. Anyone know of another good stat package? Anyone actually use Mint? Again, what I'm really looking for is something that will provide details like this screenshot (perhaps with more details on what pages were actually visited (rather than just entry and exit pages)). [thanks to Robert for the link to details on the spyware cookies] Update: StatCounter's visit detail page is pretty good, though you have to click through too many pages to get there. Technorati According to Technorati, there are 112.8 million weblogs (as we'll see, this is probably a highly dubious number). I'm going to take a wild guess and say that the grand majority of them aren't very active. Even among active ones, I'm betting that most don't have much of a readership. Like this blog! Part of this is that blogs fall into a power law distribution, with a small set of bloggers getting the majority of the traffic. The rest of us are in the long tail, and it can be hard to find each other. Enter Technorati, a service that seeks to track weblogs in numerous ways. You can go there and search on a subject to see what other blogs are saying about that subject. And if you're a blogger, you can see what other blogs are linking to you. They give each blog an "Authority" score which is based on how many people have linked to you (I think there's more to it than that, but I don't care enough to look into it that much), and then they rank all blogs by authority. To give you an idea of how this works, Kaedrin has an authority of 20. The top 10 blogs on Technorati have an authority of somewhere around 10,000 to 25,000. Here's the problem: Technorati sucks. It definitely doesn't track all the blogs out there (not that big a deal, such a task is probably pretty tough), but it's definitely sure to pick up every new bottom-feeding spammer blog. In other words, every time I write a new post, it gets linked by two freshly minted spam blogs. Those show up fine. Meanwhile, a real blogger (who is listed on Technorati) links me, and Technorati doesn't pick that up (I find out by looking at my referrers). And the same thing happens when I link to other people. For some reason, Technorati decides some of my posts are not worthy of tracking. For instance, my last post isn't showing up in Technorati. This happens every once in a while, and I think I've figured out why. It seems to happen when I post out of order. I generally post twice a week, but sometimes I start an entry early. Last week, I started writing my review of GitS:SAC on Tuesday. I hadn't finished by Wednesday, so I wrote and posted another entry while I finished off my review. On Sunday, I finished my review and posted it, but Technorati didn't pick it up (despite repeated pings and other attempts to allow the post to show up). Now, none of this shouldn't matter, but apparently Technorati thinks it does, because this exact situation has happened several times. Maybe it's because Movable Type numbers my posts, and if I post entries out of order, perhaps it confuses Technorati. For example, last week, I posted entry 1421 after I posted entry 1422. If this is why Technorati can't figure out that I posted something on Sunday, it's pretty damn stupid. It can't be that hard to fix this. Technorati claims that they track posts by scraping the page and also by using RSS feeds, but if that's the case, they must be doing something really dumb to get tripped up by postings showing up out of order. So basically, Technorati doesn't track all the good weblogs, but it keeps up with all the spammers' weblogs. For some reason, it doesn't register a post that was written out of order either. So what's the point? I guess it works ok for bloggers who get lots of links. If you get a lot of links, the signal drowns out the noise of the spammers, and you don't miss the posts that Technorati doesn't pick up because you've got plenty of other links to go through. But for those of us on the long tail, it's nearly useless. It doesn't hurt anything, I suppose, so I'll continue to check every once in a while, but I'm not getting my hopes up. I don't think I've discovered any new blogs through Technorati that I hadn't discovered first from my referrers. ![]()
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Goblin Bloggin' Since time is even shorter than usual, the Green Goblin is filling in with a video blog. Enjoy. ![]()
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Blogging Cliches About a month ago, the Kaedrin Weblog reached the 7 year point. It's hard to believe that I've been blogging for so long, even though I perhaps don't write as many posts as your typical blogger. Every now and again, I like to take a step back and look at what I'm doing and where I'm going, and now seems like a good time for that. The last time I did this was back in January, and that's when i modified my posting schedule to post at least twice a week. So far, this has worked out reasonably well, though I will admit that my Wednesday entries tend to be somewhat lacking. This is due, in part, to an unexpected work schedule (which, come to think of it, should have been expected.) Honestly, I don't know how some bloggers do it. In any case, via Steven, I came across Jeff Atwood's post about Thirteen Blog Clichés. Let's see how I'm doing:
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Sunday, April 08, 2007
Programming Notes Two things I planned to write about this week (and in the coming weeks) have been delayed or otherwise cut short. First, due to some sort of Netflix screwup, I never got discs 2-4 of Vandread: Second Stage (disc 1 was great). Instead, I got 3 movies I wasn't expecting but want to see anyway (I still haven't figured out why, as the Vandread discs were next in my queue and they have a status of being available "Now"). With any luck, I'll have the rest of the series this week. This is the first time Netflix has ever messed up for me, so I guess I shouldn't complain, but still. The second thing I was planning to write (a lot) about was the Philadelphia film festival. However, due to long hours and work and an otherwise hectic schedule, I doubt I'm going to get a chance to see the movies I wanted to. I might be able to make the trek to the city to see one or two films. Then again, I only saw 4 films last year (along with the Adult Swim thing), so I guess it won't be that much of a wash. Still, I had wanted to see more this year (and was even considering taking some time off), but the way certain projects have fallen at work, I just can't. There's always next year. So blogging will be somewhat light in the coming week (I do still have another entry for tonight though). You never know, though. Sometimes my periods of highest blogging productivity are when I'm busiest in other areas of my life. Inspiration often seems to strike when you have the least amount of time to act on it. One of the ironies of life, I guess. ![]()
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Link to Someone New, Part 3 Time is short and it's been a while since I've done this, so here are three posts from blogs I've never linked before:
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Thursday, February 22, 2007
Liveblogging on Sunday A lot of people don't like to watch the Oscars anymore. For the most part, their reasons are sound: it's a long, boring, essentially meaningless awards show in which a bunch of self-congratulatory Hollywood insiders kiss each others arse (to put it nicely). Personally, I find that I'm able to deal with it mostly because I liveblog the event and usually get drunk. It's one of those rare occassions where a live event coincides with my blogging schedule, so I feel obligated to oblige. Anyway, I just wanted to let everyone know that I'll be updating all night on Sunday. Feel free to stop by and comment. I've been doing this for the past couple of years, and it's actually kinda fun. See previous installments here: 2006, 2005 and 2004. See you Sunday! ![]()
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Say Hello, Dammit! I'm apparently about a month late to the party (what else is new?), but National De-lurking Week is a neat idea, so I figured I'd give it a shot. Like a lot of bloggers, most of what I write here is primarily for my own benefit. At the same time, it's always nice to know that someone is reading, and I wouldn't publish it on the internet if I was writing only for myself. However, one of the frustrating things about blogging is that it can be difficult to know who is reading. I have been lucky enough to have a small group of regular readers, most of whom comment regularly on the blog (thanks guys!). And I've picked up a few more regular readers over the years as well, though many of them tend to be lurkers - people who regularly visit, but don't comment. This post is aimed at that second group of people. To be honest, I'm not even sure how many there are, but if happen to be a regular reader of this blog and haven't commented, please do so! As Sheryl puts it: ...I just read a Psychology Today article which notes a direct correlation between weight loss, and commenting on your favorite blogs, so leave a comment because it will make you skinny. Not that you're fat, because you're not!! So tell me how long you've been reading my blog, or your favorite book, or the first word that pops into your mind when you hear the word shish-kabob, and remember, if you don't leave a comment, you're letting the terrorists win.And heck, if you're a regular commenter (or someone who doesn't comment often), feel free to comment about whatever you like. After all, I have a feeling there aren't going to be so many comments on this post, and I'd love to hear from everyone.
Update 2.11.07: Well then, this was not so much of a success. This is mildly strange, as I can see from my referrer logs that there are people coming here that have not posted. Either they're not reading this post, or they're being rebellious. Strange. Thanks to all who commented, though:) ![]()
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Link to Someone New Once again, time has run short (big game* stuff), so I'll simply resort to throwing a few links at you under the pretense that I'm fighting the closed loop of blogreading that many fall into (previous installment here). So here:
* I should trademark the phrase "Big Game" so that people can't say that either. ![]()
Monday, January 01, 2007
State of the Blog Another year has ended, and I've found it occasionally helpful to take a step back, examine what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and where I'm going from here. I've been blogging in one form or another for over 6 years, and things have evolved considerably since I started. One characteristic of the blog that has changed since its inception has been the frequency of posts. While I've never been a "post every day" kind of blogger, I came pretty close a few times during my first year of blogging. I've scaled back considerably since then (for varied and sundry reasons), though I have tried to stay consistent by establishing a weekly schedule. Of course, posting once a week (on Sunday) probably isn't frequent enough to really garner a large audience... but I've written before about why I'm fine with that. My reasons for writing are still largely the same: One of the reasons I write here is to learn. Many of the subjects I write about here are unfamiliar to me, and I use the process of writing about them to learn. This usually means that I will need to familiarize myself with a bunch of material, or spend a lot of time thinking about something and figuring out what it means and how to write about it. This usually takes a lot of time and effort, and I prefer to have a few uninterrupted hours to compose something like that. This is why I post on Sundays, because I have the time then. I honestly don't know how other bloggers do it, especially the really popular ones who still manage to have a large output of original material. As I mentioned above, I tend to view blogging as an exercise in thinking, a way to learn, and a way to have fun.Naturally, this isn't the only reason I write here - having readers is an integral part of blogging, and the past year has been good to me, thanks to links from generous bloggers (who happen to populate my blogroll). My readership is still relatively small, but growing, which is good. In any case, I noticed that I posted 12 times in December 2006. This is paltry in comparison to most successful blogs, but it's the most I've posted in a single month since August of 2001, and I think I'm due (perhaps long over-due) for an expansion of the weekly posting schedule. So I'll be posting at least twice a week, once on Sunday and once on Wednesday. I'm sure you're all entralled by this announcement. This actually isn't all that different than what has been happening naturally, but I've found that making this sort of thing formal is important. Hence this post. ![]()
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Link to Someone New A while back, Shamus wrote about the tendency for blogs (and bloggers) to get stuck in a closed loop, constantly reading and linking to the same group of blogs. I'm as guilty as anyone (plus, I have a tendency to not link other blogs at all), so in an effort to combat the blogging equivalent of inbreeding, here are links to three blogs I've never linked before:
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Thursday, December 14, 2006
A Spamtastic Mystery One of the joys of maintaining a website is dealing with spam. Over the years, I've had to deal with several different varieties of spam here, including comment spam, trackback spam, even my old forum got inundated with spam. As such, countermeasures were deployed with varying degrees of success. Movable Type has improved its spam blocking capabilities considerably, and I use a plugin to close comments on posts older than 60 days, so the blog has remained relatively spam free for a while now. I replaced my forum with a new system that requires registration (ironically, even the new forum was spammed with a bizzarely intriciate scheme to sell, no joke, biodynamic cheese). This leaves referrer spam. I don't know that there's anything to really be done about that short of banning IP addresses and the like, but I never really used my site's raw referral logs that extensively, so even though I'm sure I get a decent amount of referrer spam, I don't really see it. Instead, I use sitemeter, a popular web stats application that uses an image and javascript to collect the appropriate info (you can see the little multicolored image towards the bottom of every page on Kaedrin). I'm not sure if sitemeter does something on their end to prevent referral spam, or if spambots simply ignore the technology they use, but I get next to no referrer spam there. Until this morning. I awoke to find my site had several hundred hits overnight (much more than usual). When I looked at the referrals, I noticed that I was getting a huge amount of traffic from a bunch of sites that were all variations of the same domain. A sampling includes: http://qfm96.listenernetwork.com/SearchWeb.aspAs you can see, all the referrs are coming from some sort of search application. Going to the various "listenernetwork.com" home pages, it became obvious that they were all radio station sites that were apparently all using some central application to produce cheap, easy sites for themselves (they all use the same template with content and styles tailored towards individual stations). The sites and referrals were distributed all throughout the country. At a glance, they seemed to be legit stations. How odd. All of the referrals were going to my Neal Stephenson category archive page, which was strange. At first, I thought, hey, maybe Neal Stephenson announced a new book on the radio this morning! Of course, that doesn't make much sense, but I'm a sucker for Stephenson and so I wanted to believe. In any case, it immediately became obvious that something else was going on (damn!). The most frustrating thing about these referrals is that they're obviously coming from these radio station sites' built-in search engine, which apparently uses a HTTP POST request instead of a GET request. Most search engines use GET requests because then the search parameters are contained in the URL, which allows users to bookmark searches. POST requests hide search parameters, so users can't bookmark their searches and referred sites can't see what the search terms are. So not only was I getting all this traffic from a mysterious search engine, but I didn't even know what people were searching for... Back to the logs I go. After rooting around a bit, I found some other search engines like ask and google were referring to the same Neal Stephenson page... but they had the search terms in their URL: what unit of length used in nuclear physics is named after a famed manhattan project scientist?Allright, so I'm making progress. My Stephenson category page contains most of those terms, so that kinda makes sense. I went to one of the refferring sites and was quickly able to reproduce the search on their site and see my page come up in the results. But this question is rather odd, and there were many people searching with that exact question. What the heck is going on here? Confused and a little intrigued, I started clicking around one of the referring radio station's sites hunting for clues. Then I found it. Apparently, all these stations run some sort of big national contest, and the mysterious question above was today's "Really Hard Trivia" question. The site even conveniently notes: "Don't know the answer? Search the web below." Bingo. So it appears that these are all indeed legitimate referrals, though I can't imagine anyone becoming a reader, as they didn't find the answer on my page. However, in the off chance that someone is still looking, the answer appears to be the Bohr Radius, named after Neils Bohr. It turns out that I probably could have saved myself a good deal of effort by simply googling "listenernetwork referrer spam," as this issue has apparently struck others before. Still, it was somewhat intriguing and I'm glad it didn't turn out to be referrer spam... ![]()
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Blogroll Call Everyone loves to be on a bunch of blogrolls, but just because you're there doesn't mean you'll get a lot of visitors. This becomes more true as the blogroll gets larger. Blogrolls are subject to an inverse network effect; the more blogs in the blogroll, the less valuable the link. Kaedrin gets a small amount of traffic, so even though I have a short blogroll, I'm guessing most of those blogs don't get a ton of visitors coming from here. So I just figured I'd throw some additional links their way:
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Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Traversing the Geek Tail Shamus laments the difficulty of traversing the long tail of geek blogs, and I can sympathize. The need for better information aggregation and analysis has been something of a theme on this blog for a while, so I figured I'd make a few comments. Interestingly enough, this dovetails with another discussion I followed a while back (and never got around to writing about). First, to illustrate a point, I wanted to recount how I found Twenty Sided. Basically, it all started with that infamous blond joke. I didn't link to Shamus for the joke, but it turns out that we both linked to the same place (and we both apparently found out about the blond joke from Chizumatic). I was intrigued by the blond joke phenomenon, and made a half hearted attempt at mapping the tree of links (once I realized how many branches and branches-of-branches there were, I gave up). Since we'd both linked to the same place and since we'd both pinged that blog (so that our links showed up on the linked post), Twenty Sided was one of the first I recorded. At some point, I ended up viewing his main page and commented on one of this posts. Shamus apparently noticed and then started reading my blog, and on we went. There are a couple of things to note here. I discovered Twenty Sided almost completely by accident. It was the result of a lame yet deceptively complex blog meme (the sort of thing I used to avoid like the plague). In short, I found his blog through serendipity. What's more, I've found that many of my favorite sites were found in a similar manner: when I wasn't actually looking for them. Which brings me to a recent (er, 5 month old) article on the subject: Serendipity is defined as the ability to make fortunate discoveries accidentally. There's so much of modern life that makes it preferable to the vaunted good old days - better hygiene products and power steering leap to mind - but in these disposable days of now and the future, the concept of serendipity is endangered.There is obviously value in analog serendipity (i.e. browsing the library stacks, etc...). Indeed, I used to take a guilty pleasure in ransacking the shelves of the library in which I was supposed to be studying. On one such expedition, I discovered The Book of Imaginary Beings ("a handbook of the strange creatures conceived through time and space by the human imagination") which inspired me to create a new website (that has sadly been neglected for years). On the other hand, what the hell is this guy talking about? Like Steven Johnson, I have to wonder if this guy even uses the internet... I find these arguments completely infuriating. Do these people actually use the web? I find vastly more weird, unplanned stuff online than I ever did browsing the stacks as a grad student. Browsing the stacks is one of the most overrated and abused examples in the canon of things-we-used-to-do-that-were-so-much-better. (I love the whole idea of pulling down a book because you like the "binding.") Thanks to the connective nature of hypertext, and the blogosphere's exploratory hunger for finding new stuff, the web is the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture. It is far, far easier to sit down in front of your browser and stumble across something completely brilliant but surprising than it is walking through a library looking at the spines of books.Is there a way to harness serendipity in an organized fashion? After all, serendipity isn't just random noise, it's the unexpected discovery of signal. The trick is really getting started. Shamus mentions in his post that his starting points are Google, Technorati, and referral logs (i.e. noticing that someone has linked to you). Google is a reasonable starting place for general information, but there's way too much information to sift through there, and it's difficult to find a good geek blog that way. Technorati is hit or miss (mostly miss, in my experience) and referral logs are wonderful if you get noticed (but that's not as easy as it sounds and doesn't happen all that often, especially to beginners). In the past, I've found blogs I've liked in many ways. Often, I will find a blog I like, then surf through blogrolls. This will sometimes result in a good find (often chaining through several blogroll trees), though it also seems to induce something of a short-term ADD in me as I mostly scan without reading unless something really catches my eye. I used to post a lot on discussion boards and do a lot of debating. This often led me to do some research on various subjects, which sometimes turned up interesting articles. Finding these articles, then exploring the site it's on or googling the author will sometimes yield results. There are, of course, the big social aggregators like Digg and Reddit. I've always found del.icio.us to be a good place to start (particularly the popular page). Of course, you still have to sift through all of these things to find the hidden gems, but once you do, the structure of the internet gives you the ability to follow a trail of associations (blogrolls being the key example here) easily and efficiently (once you find a blog you like, aggregators like Technorati become a little more useful). Those social aggregators are a good starting place, but they still leave something to be desired. However, all of these sites have come on strong only in the last couple of years and they're growing better every day. In any case, I've noticed that my blogroll has become a bit stale these days. I still read most of those blogs regularly and they're all good, but I think it's time to add some new ones. After all, the past several entries have referenced the same blogs over and over again! Alas, I'll be away on vacation next week, with little or no computer access, so perhaps I'll just start with a "link to someone new" type post... ![]()
Friday, July 07, 2006
Another Guest Blogger I'll be travelling yet again this weekend and thus won't have much time to blog. However, long time Kaedrin compatriot DyRE will be posting in my absence (at least once on Sunday, as per the schedule). I feel confident that DyRE's geek credentials will more that suffice. Have a good weekend everyone! Posted by Mark on July 07, 2006 at 12:14 AM .:
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Friday, June 23, 2006
Guest Blogger I'll be travelling this weekend and thus won't have much time to blog. However, long time Kaedrin compatriot Samael will be posting in my absence (at least once on Sunday, as per the schedule). Astute readers may recognize the name from his Super Mario Mega Marathon of Madness and his comments on Pre-NES games. I don't know what he'll be writing about, but he assures me it will be something geeky. Have a good weekend! ![]()
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Tag Map of Kaedrin Via lots of people, here is a graph of the underlying HTML structure of the Kaedrin Weblog:
What do the colors mean?So what are we looking at in my graph? (One note, I generated this graph last night before I posted, so this graph reflects a page that has changed.) Well, the big clump of orange and blue on the left side of the graph is obviously my side navigation, filled with links and line breaks (i.e. the blogroll and archive links). The other big clump of orange and blue (bottom right) is the main area of posts on the page. Because I've recently gone on a spree of posts with lots of images, there is also a bunch of violent in that area. The image filled posts are also the cause of the offshoots from this area, as I've foolishly used some tag-soup to get the layout right. I believe the remaining offshoot, in the middle of the graph, is the masthead (the top of the page with the Kaedrin logo and main navigation links). It's not as pretty as those nifty XHTML/CSS pages, but it gets the job done (and it validates!) One of these days I'll get around to actually converting this layout to XHTML and CSS, but don't hold your breath. I tried to exactly replicate this layout once and just got frustrated, so when it happens, it will probably be accompanied by a minor design overhaul. ![]()
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Weblog Usability For the past week or so, I've been making various improvements to the weblog. Some of it is behind the scenes type stuff that isn't even visible, and much of the other changes are relatively subtle. Many of the improvements are aimed at making things easier for new visitors, especially those who stumble onto an individual entry or archive page. For new visitors and those who aren't so familiar with blogs, it's important to provide some sort of context and assistance (especially for confusing technologies like trackbacks and RSS). So what's changed?
First is Jacob Nielson's recent alertbox column, Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes. Quickly going through his list of mistakes:
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Sunday, September 18, 2005
Spam Fighting Update A few weeks ago, I installed Movable Type 3.2. One of the supposed big enhancements was improved tools for fighting spam in both comments and trackbacks. At the time, I wasn't sure how well it would work, but after a few weeks, I can say that this system is great! Not a single spam comment or trackback has made it through (several hundred attempts were blocked) - and this is with almost no configuration on my part (much better than MT Blacklist on all fronts). This is mostly due to the inclusion of the SpamLookup plugin in the release. If you run a Movable Type blog, I highly recommend upgrading to 3.2 or at least installing SpamLookup. ![]()
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Trackbacks I took some time out this weekend to upgrade Movable Type to the newly released 3.2 version. Despite appearing to be a small number increase in versions, it actually contains a huge amount of enhancements and new functionality, much of it focusing on combating spam. Not so long ago, I took some measures to deal with comment spam, but trackback spam almost immediately picked up and the options for dealing with trackback spam were, at the time, very limited. For those unaware of the concept, the trackback system is a way for a website (it was designed for blogs, but could be applied to any website) to list out other websites that link to the first website. This is accomplished by allowing people to "ping" an entry, thereby alerting that blog that someone has linked to that entry. The site receiving the ping typically displays the trackback information (typically including a title, a link, and a short excerpt) below the entry. It's an open system, meaning that anyone can ping any site they want, even if they haven't linked to that site. And that's why the spammers love it. After getting hit by a few hundred spam trackbacks one week, I decided to completely disable trackbacks on my blog, but I found that my options were limited. There was no easy way to do so, though I did eventually find a way that was easier than going back to every entry and disabling it manually. Then Six Apart announced that they were working on the 3.2 release and that it would include all sorts of ways to deal with trackback spam. For one, they've included a quick and easy way to disable all trackbacks (without having to resort to fiddling with the database directly), but they've also included some interesting spam filters which appear to be working well. It seems to be working well so far, but I'm still considering whether or not to keep trackbacks. Aside from the spam, there are a lot of other issues with it. It's not like everyone uses it. In the past few years, I've been linked by other blogs many times, but I've only gotten something like 5-10 trackbacks (and I lost several when I upgraded my database). But the whole experience has got me thinking about open systems and the potential for abuse. On the internet, it seems like such systems are almost always ruined by spam. It would be a shame if a service like del.icio.us were ruined by spam, but at least it isn't quite as open to blatant abuse as trackbacks were, so perhaps there's a chance. Posted by Mark on August 28, 2005 at 06:58 PM .:
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Sunday, August 07, 2005
Five Years of Kaedrin Blog Yes, you read correctly. I started this blog a little over 5 years ago. Of course, it was much different back then and there have been some periods of inactivity, but the blog in it's current form pretty much began about 2 years ago. It was about that time that I resolved to post at least once a week, a schedule I've held to pretty well and even exceeded for a while. Unfortunately, I've mostly regressed to the once a week schedule, which is part of the reason this blog has never really caught on (in terms of readers and links), though I have built up a small and loyal following (which I'm grateful for). One thing that's become more and more prevalent here is that I'll latch onto a concept and explore it from several different angles. Over the past few years, a few thematic threads have been consistently drawn, notably including the need of moderation and tradeoffs (which is part of the reason I identify with Bruce Schneier's approach to security as a series of tradeoffs) and how self-organization can aid in information aggregation. Naturally, there are some topics (movies, in particular) which I can usually fall back on when the idea well runs dry (or when I lack the motivation to produce something more weighty). In fact, one of the things I wrote about this year was just how difficult it is to run a popular blog. Never having written for a popular blog, it's mostly speculation, but I suspect that I'd have a reaction similar to Steven Den Beste's "Screw this, I'm only going to write about Anime from now on!" Anyway, since one of the major frustrations about running a blog is that all your hard work essentially smolders in the largely unvisible archives, here are some of the best entries from the past year (all of my best entries from the past 5 years are collected here, and of course the archives are also worth pursuing as well if you really enjoy what you read):
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Sunday, May 01, 2005
Old media vs. New media Allright, so I'm going to milk this subject for everything it's worth. ArsTechnica continues their coverage of the subject as well, posting an excellent summary of the debate. Overall, the picture that emerges has two sides to it. First, top-tier bloggers themselves are better educated than top-tier newspaper columnists. So one of the main attractions of blogging and other forms of online-only publishing is that you get topical commentary from trained specialists and insiders, instead of from people whose only professional training is journalism school and whose very job description is that they're professional outsiders.Interesting observations, but perhaps we're making a bit too much about this. Old media isn't going away anytime soon, it just needs to adapt to the existence of the new media. It's a symbiotic relationship (both sides need each other), even moreso than past media shifts. Historically, these sorts of shifts happen when a new medium presents itself. Newspapers had to adapt to radio and television, just as they'll have to adapt to the internet now (and so will radio and television). In Neal Stephenson's The System of the World, the character Daniel Waterhouse ponders how new systems supplant older systems: "It has been my view for some years that a new System of the World is being created around us. I used to suppose that it would drive out and annihilate any older Systems. But things I have seen recently ... have convinced me that new Systems never replace old ones, but only surround and encapsulate them, even as, under a microscope, we may see that living within our bodies are animalcules, smaller and simpler than us, and yet thriving even as we thrive. ... And so I say that Alchemy shall not vanish, as I always hoped. Rather, it shall be encapsulated within the new System of the World, and become a familiar and even comforting presence there, though its name may change and its practitioners speak no more about the Philosopher's Stone." (page 639)In his Slashdot interview, Stephenson applies the same "surround and encapsulate" concept to the literary world. And so perhaps the new media will surround and encapsulate, but never destroy, the old media. Posted by Mark on May 01, 2005 at 08:12 PM .:
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Sunday, April 24, 2005
The Mainstream Media Matt Haughey is sick of the singling out of the monolithic MSM, and he's right: I'm usually not one to throw around ultimatums, but here's a new personal rule: If you use the term "MSM" in a unironic way to denote the "Mainstream Media" I will write you off as a quack, unsubscribe from your RSS, and stop reading your blog.A few things to note here in relation to my last post on weblogs. I used the term "mainstream media" in that post (and have used it before as well) because it seems to be a common term that separates professional, broadcasted (i.e. mainstream) media (i.e. newspapers, television, radio) from informal, on-demand media (i.e. blogs). However, Haughey has a point: the line between is blurring by the second. Blogs are becoming mainstream, so the term is losing value. As such, Haughey is essentially calling bullshit on me and everyone else who uses that term, which demonstrates another point I was trying to make: It is true that some blogging proponents are preaching triumphalism, but that's part of the charm. They're allowed to be wrong and if you look closely at what happens when someone makes such a comment, you see that for every exaggerated claim, there are 10 counters in other blogs that call bullshit.I haven't actually looked into it, but I'm positive that there are tons of other blogs out there that have expressed distaste at the use of the term "mainstream media." And they're right, to a degree. I was being lazy. It's easier to say "mainstream media" than it is to write a few extra paragraphs explaining what I mean, just as it's easier to issue arbitrary ultimatums than it is to make a comprehensive value judgement of a blog. ![]()
Friday, April 22, 2005
What is a Weblog, Part II What is a weblog? My original thoughts leaned towards thinking of blogs as a genre within the internet. Like all genres, there is a common set of conventions that define the blogging genre, but the boundaries are soft and some sites are able to blur the lines quite thoroughly. Furthermore, each individual probably has their own definition as to what constitutes a blog (again similar to genres). The very elusiveness of a definition for blog indicates that perception becomes an important part of determining whether or not something is a blog. It has become clear that there is no one answer, but if we spread the decision out to a broad number of people, each with their own independent definition of blog, we should be able to come to the conclusion that a borderline site like Slashdot is a blog because most people call it a blog. So now that we have a (non)definition for what a blog is, just how important are blogs? Caesar at Arstechnica writes that according to a new poll, Americans are somewhat ambivalent on blogs. In particular, they don't trust blogs. I don't particularly mind this, however. For the most part, blogs don't make much of an effort to be impartial, and as I've written before, it is the blogger's willingness to embrace their subjectivity that is their primary strength. Making mistakes on a blog is acceptable, so long as you learn from your mistakes. Since blogs are typically more informal, it's easier for bloggers to acknowledge their mistakes. Lexington Green from ChicagoBoyz recently wrote about blogging to a writer friend of his: To paraphrase Truman Capote's famous jibe against Jack Kerouac, blogging is not writing, it is typing. A writer who is blogging is not writing, he is blogging. A concert pianist who is sitting down at the concert grand piano in Carnegie Hall in front of a packed house is the equivalent to an author publishing a finished book. The same person sitting down at the piano in his neighborhood bar on a Saturday night and knocking out a few old standards, doing a little improvisation, and even doing some singing -- that is blogging. Same instrument -- words, piano -- different medium. We forgive the mistakes and wrong-guesses because we value the immediacy and spontaneity. Plus, publish a book, it is fixed in stone. Write a blog post you later decide is completely wrong, it is actually good, since it gives you a good hook for a later post explaining your thoughts that led to the changed conclusion. The essence of a blog is to air things informally, to throw things out, to say "this interests me because ..." From time to time a more considered and article-like post is good. But most people read blogs by skimming. If a post is too long, in my observation, it does not get much response and may not be read at all.Of course, his definition of what a blog is could be argued (as there are some popular and thoughtful bloggers who routinely write longer, more formal essays), but it actually struck me as being an excellent general description of blogging. Note his favorable attitude towards mistakes ("it gives you a good hook for a later post" is an excellent quote, though I think you might have to be a blogger to fully understand it). In the blogosphere, it's ok to be wrong: Everyone makes mistakes. It's a fact of life. It isn't a cause for shame, it's just reality. Just as engineers are in the business of producing successful designs which can be fabricated out of less-than-ideal components, the engineering process is designed to produce successful designs out of a team made up of engineers every one of which screws up routinely. The point of the process is not to prevent errors (because that's impossible) but rather to try to detect them and correct them as early as possible.The problem with the mainstream media is that they purport to be objective, as if they're just reporting the facts. Striving for objectivity can be a very good thing, but total objectivity is impossible, and if you deny the inherent subjectivity in journalism, then something is lost. One thing Caesar mentions is that "the sensationalism surrounding blogs has got to go. Blogs don't solve world hunger, cure disease, save damsels in distress, or any of the other heroic things attributed to them." I agree with this too, though I do think there is something sensational about blogs, or more generally, the internet. Steven Den Beste once wrote about what he thought were the four most important inventions of all time: In my opinion, the four most important inventions in human history are spoken language, writing, movable type printing and digital electronic information processing (computers and networks). Each represented a massive improvement in our ability to distribute information and to preserve it for later use, and this is the foundation of all other human knowledge activities. There are many other inventions which can be cited as being important (agriculture, boats, metal, money, ceramic pottery, postmodernist literary theory) but those have less pervasive overall affects.Regardless of whether or not you agree with the notion that these are the most important inventions, it is undeniable that the internet provides a stairstep in communication capability, which, in turn, significantly improves the process of large-scale collaboration that is so important to human existence. When knowledge could only spread by speech, it might take a thousand years for a good idea to cross the planet and begin to make a difference. With writing it could take a couple of centuries. With printing it could happen in fifty years.And it appears that blogs, with their low barrier to entry and automated software processes, will play a large part in the worldwide debate. There is, of course, a ton of room for improvement, but things are progressing rapidly now and perhaps even accelerating. It is true that some blogging proponents are preaching triumphalism, but that's part of the charm. They're allowed to be wrong and if you look closely at what happens when someone makes such a comment, you see that for every exaggerated claim, there are 10 counters in other blogs that call bullshit. Those blogs might be on the long tail and probably won't garner as much attention, but that's part of the point. Blogs aren't trustworthy, which is precisely why they're so important. Update 4.24.05: I forgot to link the four most important inventions article (and I changed some minor wording: I had originally referred to the four "greatest" inventions, which was not the wording Den Beste had used). ![]()
Sunday, April 17, 2005
What is a Weblog? Caesar at ArsTechnica has written a few entries recently concerning blogs which interested me. The first simply asks: What, exactly, is a blog? Once you get past the overly-general definitions ("a blog is a frequently updated webpage"), it becomes a surprisingly difficult question. Caesar quotes Wikipedia: A weblog, web log or simply a blog, is a web application which contains periodic time-stamped posts on a common webpage. These posts are often but not necessarily in reverse chronological order. Such a website would typically be accessible to any Internet user. "Weblog" is a portmanteau of "web" and "log". The term "blog" came into common use as a way of avoiding confusion with the term server log.Of course, as Caesar notes, the majority of internet sites could probably be described in such a way. What differentiates blogs from discussion boards, news organizations, and the like? Reading through the resulting discussion provides some insight, but practically every definition is either too general or too specific. Many people like to refer to Weblogs as a medium in itself. I can see the point, but I think it's more general than that. The internet is the medium, whereas a weblog is basically a set of commonly used conventions used to communicate through that medium. Among the conventions are things like a main page with chronological posts, permalinks, archives, comments, calendars, syndication (RSS), blogging software (CMS), trackbacks, &c. One problem is that no single convention is, in itself, definitive of | |