Cory, thanks so much for sharing this campaign with the good people of boing. :) It’s so important to me that we understand we’re not different from those who don’t have the privilege of clean water (or vaccines, or sanitation systems) — they’re me, or they’re you, just born in a less fortunate geography.

I should point out – I used the term “sci-fi nerds” affectionately because I am one. Yes, words should mean something. But those meanings should also evolve.

I’m fine with replicator, but it’s a less known term to non-geeks than teleporter. Point being, let’s use familiar and fun names instead of our own wonky ones.

Or, we could accept that in English, as in most languages, words evolve in their meaning all the time, and it’s okay. Not everything has to fit neatly within a binary evaluation.

Couple minor nits: Might point out in the post that “Waxy” is Andy Baio, of Waxy.org, so people have that important context. And while Andy was certainly important in his former role as CTO of Kickstarter, I don’t believe he was founder, or even *a* founder. (We’re awful proud to have him as part of Expert Labs today.)

Congrats. I think ten years in is when we really get good at this stuff. 🙂

Gotta say, recognizing where the shot of the comment spam came from really did get a laugh out of me. 🙂

I’m agree with your look at the ecosystem for Twitter posting clients, but don’t agree with your conclusion. (As you might expect, based on my advocacy of the Twitter API as a standard.)

The mistake I think you’re making here is in focusing solely on the posting/reading applications as the primary type of “twitter app”. They’re actually the least interesting part, from my standpoint. If you look at something like One Forty, with a directory of all kinds of Twitter apps, the ones that are for simply reading or writing tweets are among the least interesting, and most appropriate for commoditization. I don’t even think it’s inconceivable that Twitter will add third-party API endpoint support to its own first-party clients.

More importantly, the various analytics tools, games, media add-ons, and infinite other apps that are built around the APIs would be a valuable set of capabilities for users on any platform. If the ecosystem of Twitter application developers feels concern or uncertainty about the future of their work because of Twitter, Inc.’s recent moves, I’d suggest that knowing they could reach WordPress, Tumblr, TypePad ( which also supports the Twitter API) and StatusNet users would definitely help them feel less vulnerable.

That being said, posts like this are usually used to telegraph the fact that you’ve already made the decision to create your own API, which of course is your prerogative. In that case, I’d look at the simple JSON APIs that are out there for Flickr, TypePad, TwitPic, Tumblr and others and see if you can’t just go for the second-movers’ advantage instead of starting from scratch.

OpenID in WP.org core!

And fewer published murder fantasies in comment threads in ’09!

“When a single blog post causes a response from the vice president of a rival blogging software you know your winning.”

I agree, we are winning when the standard is for people in the blogging industry to engage with their customers. That’s why we’ve always done so at Six Apart.

As far as the claims about spam, the link was pointing here: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/03/03/mullenweg-indicates-over-30-percent-of-blogs-are-spam

Note: I’d clarified that days ago on Michael’s blog, but he hasn’t approved my comment yet.

And yep, we’re all about competition. That’s why we think it’s great that our launch of Google Sitemaps on TypePad over a year ago might have helped motivate you to do better. And that’s something that lots of users have responded to.

Believe me, we haven’t taken cheap shots, we’ve pointed out legitimate areas where we do better. No user on TypePad defaults to URLs like example.com/?p=251 — it seems to me you could focus on fixing that, or the repeated, well-documented security issues instead of taking shots like “hypepad”.

I do respond, aggressively, when people have factual inaccuracies in their posts, and Michael’s post has more than half a dozen of them. But if you look at our track record on our own blogs, we focus primarily on the strengths of our platforms, and think you’d do well to do the same.

This is definitely cool. Chad’s been a long-time MT plugin developer and he’s always keeping his eye out for stuff that can make MT blogs better. I think, just as we made TypePad AntiSpam work for WordPress users, too, there’s some real benefits for everybody when services are open enough for any blogger to benefit from.

Whoops, omitted the link I meant to post: http://www.movabletype.org/2008/02/making_your_site_bullet_proof.html

David, there are obviously always going to be performance and memory enhancements to be made for any application written in a scripting language. If you’d like to visit our community at movabletype.org, you can join the dozens of other people who’ve helped make significant improvements in MT4.1, the current release, along with an extraordinary number of additional fixes to both performance and memory usage going into the next release of MT. There’s no reason to resort to spreading FUD when the facts are readily available.

Chuck, just so you know, at Six Apart, we do run Vox, which is a free blogging service that compares very favorable to the other services you’ve mentioned.

“With MT4 poised for release, you can prolly expect more of this kind of mudslinging.”

Joni, it’s worth mentioning that we at Six Apart don’t condone this sort of pettiness, we actively discourage it, and we take pains to be supportive to the *entire* blogging community, not just those on Movable Type, LiveJournal, Vox, or TypePad. And I’d encourage everyone else to refrain from mudslinging or unfair assertions, too.

I doubt too many people are still following the thread, but I hate to think someone judges an entire community by uncharacteristically negative members — that wouldn’t acquit any of us very well in the long run.

How cool! Nice work, and nobody better than Simon to do it.

Any chance you’re going to support the format as an export format? It’s only one that most tools can use, and a pretty smart guy said, “But there’s another even better reason to respect prior art. If we do it the same way — instead of two ways to do something, there’s only one. That means that any software that worked with the other guy’s product works with ours.”

Does the MT import format suck? Yup. Is it comprehensive? Nope. Should you *also* have your own format for completenes? Absolutely. But you should have the confidence by now to build an export into a format everyone can use to bring posts in and out of other systems.

Thanks for the kind words — it’s always rare for people to take the time to praise online, compared to how often we all like to complain. 🙂 I know our support team appreciates it, too.

Whoops, I deleted my first line there by accident… I was basically making an analogy to how SPF works. (http://www.openspf.org/)

I wouldn’t read too much into any one line, you know that press stories by their nature can only reflect a tiny bit of the conversation you have with the writer. All I meant is that authentication and accountability are always going to have a role in preventing spam, as will centralized filters, trust networks, and economic (dis)incentives.

For example, a lot of applications of blog technology can happen in situations where sending submissions through a third-party service (even a trusted one, etc.) isn’t an option, and there needs to be an answer for those situations, too. Even if we all succeed in blocking 100% of spam — that doesn’t address the larger need for actually encouraging positive valuable contributions, or making sure we’re not just passing the cost of spam on to other parts of the ecosystem.

Heh, these days my startup do’s and don’ts aren’t really about technology or scaling or any of the stuff that’s been mentioned above. I should really think it through enough to do a longer post, but one of the things I’m kind of surprised by is the lack of ambition of a lot of efforts today. Like, don’t set a goal of being “the fourth most popular application for tagging podcasts on mobile devices”. Try to change the world! I think that’s my “do”, “try to change the whole world”.

That might not be the answer you were asking for. 🙂

Oh, c’mon, let’s have some perspective. You’ve got the word “Matt” linked to your site on pages all over the web; One single blog post won’t make a difference either way. And Mark, given that we’d probably be called to task whether we omitted Matt’s name or included it, there’s probably no way for us to participate in the conversation without somebody getting bothered. Heck, even you called out in bold that Byrne mentions our coworkers… on our own blog. What’s up with that? OMG scandalous respect for peers!

As much as I’m glad to have a dialogue around any interesting topic, I’d be even happier if it was more productive. Matt, you’re both the featured interview in a respected podcast and quoted in a fairly well-read blog, and it helped prompt a solid conversation: Be happy, instead of looking for slights. David Hansson and Cal Henderson were both omitted in the same post, both in name and in link, and so far they’ve been able to suffer the indignity somehow. 🙂

I think we talked about something similar when you first came by the 6A offices, and it’s that the blessing and curse of creating communications tools is that the communities around them will keep you honest and humble when you most need it and least expect it.

For what it’s worth, it only takes a few days for it to stop stinging and for any of us to realize that communicating well is *hard*, and that’s how we forget to do it, despite the fact that the tools make it easy to do so. Once that initial period is over, I’ve found that you learn some of the best and most valuable lessons you get to. I’m sure you’ll be at that point soon, and don’t worry, by the time you get to almost a year later, you can laugh about these sorts of things. 🙂

Take the time to enjoy Italy, the web will wait.

Thanks, Jeff. Watching your reactions and evolution to that day has always been a benchmark for my own observations and remembrances of processing being in NYC then, and I appreciate you taking the time to note it. I think you’ve done justice to the obligation we all felt to remember the lessons of that day.

A characteristically brave and open announcement, Jeff, that I wish you never had to make. I’m confident you’ll get through this as smoothly as possible (stubbornness must surely be a huge advantage here!) and I’m thankful that you have the right coverage to make sure you are well taken care of. (Your friends and family, of course, have a comprehensive plan for looking after you as well. :))

I agree that a blog is a place. Are you saying you want to live in a place where anonymous threats of violence are acceptable, commonplace, and unpunished? Isn’t that contradictory with the whole war-on-terror thing?

Jeff, your point is well taken (then as now), but I think it probably makes sense to clarify more about where the products are today vs. where they were then. Our company is about blogging, in all its forms, for all its potential audiences.

One of them is, for example, intranet blogs. Not particularly sexy to the Web 2.0 or New Journalism worlds, but it’s a good business and I think useful to help businesses do that. So, we have MT Enterprise, and that basically doesn’t compete with anything, either from us or from anybody else. Similarly, TypePad is (IMO) the most powerful hosted blog service, and I think even the many web hosts that use MT for their blog services would concede that.

But for more social blogs, and for social networks, I think you’re absolutely right. All of LiveJournal and most parts of Vox are open source; So as a company overall, I think we’re on board with the sentiment you’re describing. The truth is, though, that installable blogging tools really don’t compete with socially-networked hosted services.

(On a sidenote, my defensiveness and general impoliteness in that thread was lame, and I’m sorry for it. I’d hate to think people would judge our entire company by that any more than they’d judge an entire organization by one person’s having a bad day.)

Aw, hell, you can’t link to the DMN *editor’s blog* and then say their last innovation was the CueCat — who else has an editor’s blog for you to link to? Besides, having venture capitalists pay to send barcode readers to geeks seems damn close to altruism to me. :)

Oh, and to be clear, Movable Type’s licenses are significantly cheaper than ExpressionEngine for personal users. And lots of people switch to MT every day, they’re just usually more busy blogging about the topics of their blog than about the tools that power it. In all, it might help to think of “unlimited blogs” as a new feature that everyone gets in this version, if you’re still struggling with the idea that we want to make it easier for everyone to have as many blogs as they need.

I’m fascinated that people get mad if we charge for a certain number of blogs, then get mad that we made unlimited blogging available in the free license. It almost seems as if people just like to get mad. :)

For what it’s worth, we thought that it’s so easy to manage multiple blogs in MT 3.2 that we wanted everyone to be able to have as many blogs as they want. Nothing more complicated than that, though the fact that we’re able to have a business model we’re proud which supports the application’s development is the reason that’s possible.

The Tags on Gawker’s blogs are powered by the MT Tags plugin we published, and those tags are automatically picked up by Technorati when you ping them.

“That has to be the most moronic claim I’ve ever read – TV makes us smarter, better, is good for you. What’s next catsup is really a vegetable?”
I think the problem, Brian, is that you didn’t read the article, and you certainly haven’t read the book.

Um, from the quote you pulled, the intent was to humanize muslims. *Not terrorists*, but muslims. What’s wrong with that?
I think it’s fascinating that so many of the commenters treat these things as equivalent. When Jeff argues for people to read Iranian blogs, he’s humanizing a group that includes a lot of muslims. Where’s the vitriol towards Jeff for being pro-terror?

It probably makes more sense to ask Pam and the Stacked crew what they think about this, since they all have blogs themselves.

We can maintain all your permalinks no problem, Jeff. Shoot me an email if you need an upgrade install and I’ll get you in touch with our team. (I’d emailed you on this, dunno if you got that.)

I dunno, part of me thinks having a collection of highly-linked blogs is still pretty valuable. I mean, if Weblogs, Inc. scales to this size, or Gawker were 50 times bigger, how would that be different than About?

I can think of at least a dozen people who’ve gotten book deals from their blogs. I know of 3 couples just in my circle of friends who married people they met through weblogs. I know of half a dozen companies that wouldn’t have existed if not for blogging.
“Ben & Mena of Six Apart (Movable Type & TypePad) got married after Ben built Movable Type to power her blog. ”
Actually, they were married before that. But I think their lives have certainly been changed a little bit by blogging. The effort they started together in their spare bedroom now has over 70 employees on three continents.
I actually don’t believe anyone’s ever been fired for blogging. Many people have lost jobs due to inappropriate communication, but that phenomenon predates blogs.
In my own case, I’ve gotten 2 jobs, 3 apartments, a girlfriend, a dog, a cat, and almost all of my close friends either directly or indirectly through blogging.

As Dave mentioned, there’s an MT plugin that automatically generates keywords for a post and makes them tags. Also, one point of note that a lot of people haven’t seen about Technorati Tags is that they use the categories you’ve already set up for posts to assign tags, by reading your feeds. That means if you’re assigning categories to posts, you’re *already* tagging posts.
And yeah, categories are too hard to set up right now. We’ll try and fix that up.

So, Bennett, we meet again.
The show actually *had* aired by some affiliates before Jason posted his clip. And journalists don’t need permission to excerpt a work while reviewing it or reporting on it. Not to throw *too* many facts into the mix, this being a blog and all.

The worst part is, you’re still on the old version of MT! Only the new interface is worth dreaming about…

Yeah, I have to second the “bash spendy parents, not Yoga” idea. My father taught me a lot of the basics of yoga as a kid and there’s a lot that’s served me well my whole life. Of course, he wasn’t paying himself $400 an hour to spend time with me.

I just find it amusing that Libertarians are so clearly in love with a medium that was sponsored by federal dollars, developed by academics who were never forced to cost justify anything, and is powered largely by software that’s available at no cost and shared freely.
Of course, Libertarians love to drive the Federal highway system, too. Next they’ll be drinking Tang.

Paladin, do you think bloggers should have to face those “real consequences” as well?

It’s funny, I’ve been ruminating on what an uncivil community we’ve made in weblogs, especially around political weblogs, and it looks like it’s spreading to print journalism. Not exactly the impact I was hoping we’d have. I wrote more about it here:
http://www.dashes.com/anil/2004/10/11/an_unkind_commu

Not to get off-topic from the idiotic flaming, but the NYTimes wasn’t drawing those parallels, Jeff, Spiegelman was. The reviewer was (somewhat) accurately describing the tone and contents of the book.
Your assertion here is as inane as blaming the MoveOn.com site organizers for one wrongheaded ad that was uploaded to their site… you’re blaming the Times for writing about the book by saying they wrote the book’s ideas.

I should be clear: I sympathize with this young woman, and hell, I probably agree with most of her political positions. But her writing about the peanut butter sandwiches in the holding center being lousy just seems… farcical. It’s not helping her achieve her political goals.
Protest can, and frequently does have a point. My great-grandfather was intimately involved in Gandhi’s protest marches, and the work he and his compatriots did changed the world. So I’m not arguing that nobody should protest ever. I’m saying that people who are passionate and young and enthusiastic about issues should pursue courses of action that help effect the change they’d like to see in the world.
I don’t feel that was the case in these circumstances. No minds were changed, no policy was modified, and no dialogue was established.

Being the same age as Meep, I have to agree and also point out that it’s likely that we’re the ones (those born 1975 and later) who are likely to decide this election. Keep on blathering about non-issues, folks…

Man, I’m glad we’re adding PHP support to MT, he looks great at this stuff!

To be fair, and I’ve said this to Cam as well as some of the folks he was talking to, you’re talking about a remarkably substantial initiative, from a logistical standpoint, that had to happen on an incredibly short time frame.
Putting aside organizational issues, funding, budget constraints, management, hiring, and physical logistics, just getting the *tech* for something like that kind of web community together in the few short months between Kerry’s clinching of the nomination and the convention’s staging seems, well, a recipe for disaster.
Technorati’s getting a tiny fraction of the traffic and attention that the entire convention is getting, and they’ve got a number of good, smart, talented people, a decent amount of money, and have had over a year since launch. And they’re still getting frustrated users of their service. If you had to create something like this suggested community, which would be on a larger scale, with an order of magnitude more readers, and absolutely bulletproof requirements for technology and community management, you’d be asking for trouble.
You’d end up, in my (educated by probably somewhat cautious) opinion, with a troubled technical system whose most minor bugs would overshadow the main point that everyone was at the convention for.
Instead, they got a *ton* of good press and good will for having added 35 people to the roster of over 15,000 who were already attending the convention. Seems very efficient to me.
And they raised the bar for what the RNC is going to be expected to deliver, since no matter *how* good the Republican execution is, (given their additional months for planning and the foreknowledge of who their candidate is) they’ll still be seen, to some degree, as just doing a “me too” embracing of bloggers.
I wish Cam’s ambition had happened. I have a vested interest in making sure it’s possible to do in the future, and hopefully in the 2005 future, not the 2008 future. But given the constraints that were in place, they made the right choice for maximum impact and minimum cost.
Put yourself in their shoes, and I think the picture becomes clearer. That’s not to say we shouldn’t aspire to the ultimate in transparency in the future. But taking a baby step, or even a giant leap, as I think the DNC has, is pretty good for a first try.

Eh, it’s TV and it’s a political convention. Symbolism and a lack of subtlety are the order of the day.

You can get a lot better idea of what Mena said from the text of her speech, Blogs, Bandwidth, and Banjos.
Clever name, that.

Gotta agree, Jeff, you’re off base. Time-pressed planning for a huge event is bound to have some errors, like overcounting or undercounting for stuff. Ascribing malice to error is unfair.
And if the RNC did get around to inviting *any* bloggers, it would only be because the DNC took the first step. Don’t they deserve some credit for that?
Finally, what are they afraid of in allowing comments? Well, how ’bout getting slammed unfairly the same way MoveOn (and later Kerry) were for the stupid “Hitler” ads? All it takes is one determined commenter to say some stupid thing, or even an anti-Kerry plant to say something deliberately offensive, and the press will say “DNC Website filled with hate speech!”
Blame lazy reporting for an unwillingness to allow comments.

Oh, and TypePad *is* licensable. We’ve already done it in Japan, Spain, Germany, France, and Italy. Feel free to get in touch. :)

But I will add one more complaint: The one feature I have been dying to have for month’s is a page on which I can display all (or more than five) comments so I can deal with spam more effectively. “It’s coming,” I was told a few times. Problem is, it came in a new version that brings all kinds of headaches.
We’ve got that in MT3, and it’d be free for your site. Is there a reason that doesn’t work for you?

I don’t think anybody’s arguing authentication solves spamming, but that tools like TypeKey and Blogger’s comment authentication help to encourage the maintenance of an identity, as you’ve mentioned, or to at least allow a way to manage a commenter across your entire site, instead of one comment at a time.

Seems like commenters being authenticated would help with that, no?

The personal/noncommercial license specifically allows incidental revenue like blog ads or tip jars or affiliate revenue, just to accommodate the way personal bloggers use the app. That was fun trying to explain to a lawyer.

Perhaps a more productive way to frame the argument is, if the family of a fallen soldier *wants* their family member’s sacrifice remembered, why is that a bad idea? If I care about your grandmother’s life, is it wrong to want to see her and remember her?
More to the point, Jeff, have you seen Sinclair’s record of support for the Republican Party? Do you think their decision (and extremely public announcement of it) is any less political than Koppel’s? If so, why? And if not, why is their type of political expression okay, but not Koppel’s?

I find it amusing that a Time publication credits you as founder of buzzmachine.com. You’d think they might menntion in passing some other work you’ve done for the parent company. :)

I suspect from Stephen’s tone that he wouldn’t want to participate in the wiki because he would hold it in the same contempt that he holds for blogs. I am always suspect of people who think words like “lawyer” or “blogger” are insults.

MT definitely doesn’t publish draft posts by default in any of its feeds. Having a post marked as “publish” and then moving it to draft status without republishing your feeds is the only way you’d have draft content appear in a feed, unless you’re doing advanced plugins and hacking templates and all that other craziness.

Jeff, MT has categories. Might I suggest a “Howard Stern” category?

Yes, but have you stopped beating your wife?
And Richard, I think the official fake name for Gibson’s film is Good Friday the 13th.

Great list, Jeff. And Jay’s request is already possible in MT, it just requires a plugin right now.

I was just poking at Jeff in a friendly way. Obviously I love his site or I wouldn’t read it every day, and I probably comment more frequently on his site than any other I read.
My site’s certainly no less ugly, so I hope nobody misreads my joke as anything intentionally negative.

I’m fascinated by how right-wing apologists who are so quick to go after (real or perceived) anti-semitism on the left are giving Gibson a free pass on this, simply because Gibson is a regressive conservative.

Your permalinks on this homepage aren’t pointing to those individual archives yet, though. You’ll need to update the template to use the individual post pages instead of the weekly page and anchor link.

The Disney situation is one that’s actually becoming increasingly common, where the tasks are being accomplished by people who are geographically dispersed, perhaps not just across a campus of offices, but across the country or around the world. They’re also performing tasks (in this case, TV production) where you have to coordinate more individuals than any manager could personally keep track of. Information flow is the hardest part of doing TV production on a schedule, so the faster, easier, and more efficient the tools being used to communicate status, the more time there is to make decisions about the final product.
Glad I could help out.

First, to clarify Jeff’s question about Atom being “two-directional”, this was reflecting the fact that Atom is one standard for both reading (syndication) and writing (posting via an API) blogs.
To answer the broader question, the technologies that the Disney team was talking about were simply being used to help people list the tasks they’d accomplished during their shift at work. These logs of their work are called “shift logs”, and the tool they used to post about their work is Movable Type.
For people keeping track of a large number of logs, or of logs with a high volume of new posts, it can be overwhelmingly difficult to manually browse to each site to check for updates, even if you have the sites bookmarked.
So, for most weblog tools including Movable Type, you can tell your tool to publish a special file called a syndication file, which lets your readers keep track of all their logs in a simple program, just like you read email.
In addition to having a single consistent way to read all those posts, syndication lets you know when the site updates, relieving you from having to go out to each site to see if it updates.
The implementation at Disney was just focused on telling everyone “just write about what you’ve done, so we all can have a record to refer to.” The fact that they *didn’t* say, “here’s what a weblog is, and here’s the blogosphere, and here’s how to be a pundit…” is what Jeff was referring to by pointing out that people weren’t aware they were “blogging” while updating their shift logs.
Finally, the “two-way” nature of working with these tools means that, using a format called Atom, any program can both read weblogs and post to them in one simple format. So, from within your existing email program, or from a page on the web, you can keep track of all the information on weblogs in a simpler format, spending less time catching up on updates. And you can collect that information and publish it out to the web without having to pay attention to the technology of publishing. You can find out more about Atom at the AtomEnabled website, at AtomEnabled.org.

Wait a minute. Fox as opinionated media, I’ll readily concede. But Fox as *honesty*? Are you kidding me?

Jeff, why don’t you bash Bush more for the fact that he only came to see Iraq as a humanitarian battle after the left forced him to justify it on those grounds since his initial arguments were lies? Liberals deserve all the credit for there even *being* humanitarian concern for Iraqis, and you seem more interested in attacking the Left than pointing out the Right’s inexcusable moral failing in this area.

Does anybody argue that large corporations are generally not morally responsible entities in most of their effect on American society? I’m a proud American and lifelong entrepreneur, but big businesses have a lot of truly horrible things they can legitimately be blamed for, and Carlin isn’t wrong to point such things out.
The fact that most of our domestic policy and much of our foreign policy is influenced by or even decided by those corporations is one that gives me pause, and I’m surprised it doesn’t bother others more.

Good news for those who read Blogger sites, they’ve just launched support for Atom feeds, and Sean, you might want to try either Newsgator, an excellent Windows program for reading syndication feeds (with Atom support coming shortly) or NewsGator, a nice reader that integrates into Outlook and is already AtomEnabled.

I’m curious, Jeff, if you keep saying how the election should be focused on positivity, especially by those of us on the left, why do you keep harping on the negatives of one guy who’s in (at best) third place?
What do you *want* to see? What are the praiseworthy traits of our Democratic candidates? There’s nobody who ever leads with just heart or just their head, we know that, so it seems like a petty and pointless issue to fixate on.

Hmm, it *does* map pretty well to his behavior:
Arrogance

I think it’s a great idea, and (this may have changed since you were in the beta, I don’t recall offhand) it’s 2 clicks in TypePad to the suggestion form from any screen in the application. Not quite a one-click suggestion button, but pretty close.
Just go to Help and then New Ticket. The form lets you choose “I have a suggestion”, you type in your idea and hit send and it’s in our database.
I think the error reporting on Microsoft apps is a half-step towards this stuff, but hopefully people will start to expect it to be simple, if not automatic, to get to a suggestion form when they have ideas.

I’m fairly sure I’ve seen a plugin to do this for MT. If I can find a link, I’ll write it up on the Movable Type site. If anyone else finds it first, let me know.
For what it’s worth, that was the original genesis of my Daily Links list. Then it got out of control and took over my life.

I should clarify that I’m being at least half tongue-in-cheek. I think it’s great that kids have these outlets for their ideas and thoughts. I just have an issue with the fact that the only blogs that are reported are teenage angsty blogs and raving political blogs.
The Iraqi blogs Jeff talks about, the regular people connecting with far-away family, those things are much more likely to draw people in and make them realize that they can publish and have a voice, too. It’s not a new problem for blogs; Four years ago everyone said all blogs were about technology, and that wasn’t true either.
It’s not the press’ job, of course, to convince people that they can have a voice of their own on the net. I’m sure some conspiracy-minded people would say that these articles are oriented towards *preventing* it. But it doesn’t stop me from wishing that these stories were a little less of the “hey, look at these crazy people!” and a little more of “hey, look at these regular folks like you!”

BitTorrent is the right technical solution to the popularity penalty. It’s just too hard to use right now. I predict we’ll ahve usable clients and management tools within 3 to 6 months.

I have to say I’m more conflicted than you… Just googling for terms and pasting in blog comments (a commenter on gothamist is quoted without even being named; couldn’t they have tracked the person down?) seems like awfully lazy journalism to me.

I definitely think that a totally passive system of determining social networks is the next level we’re all headed towards, I just get excited that we’re making some first steps towards that goal.

There has never been *any* weblog award that wasn’t disputed, fractious, and rife with cheating. Given that history, we at least have to give Nikolai credit for having the first award to start the horrible trend.

Not to get too much into people’s personal business, but I’m pretty sure we’ve already seen blog divorces. This phenomenon is half a decade old already, don’t forget. I know we’ve already seen blog marriages, blog babies, and blog jobs.

“It’s a rejection of the country’s values and mores.” Right, just like a yarmulke is a rejection of the country’s values and mores, right?
And working on getting mention of Christianity out of the EU constitution is the *best* thing the french have done lately.

Yeah, we need a couple of key pieces of information to debug this… what browser/OS are you on? And does the column rule come back if you highlight the text on the page?

I don’t see that current copyright law stands in their way.
Which is exactly why Lessig’s work is valuable. Many artists who are not borrowing, but are creating new works, are stymied by the unchecked expansion of copyright’s mandate.

There’s more to the history of kindness in Hershey than most people know. The amusement park in Hershey started as a park for the factory workers to enjoy. The Milton Hershey school in the town was set up for the education of orphans and is financed by the surrounding land being leased out to residents. There’s a broad history of generosity in the Hershey name, so it’s perhaps even more fitting a brand to be trumpeted than you realized, Jeff.

Funny, his proposals on copyright have rarely taken the individuals need for income into consideration before.
You guys are so off base here it’s not even funny. The existence of Creative Commons licenses *strengthens* copyright, and only makes sense in a system where copyright exists. If you think CC licensing can’t increase your profits, I’d ask you to argue the point with Cory Doctorow, whose success as a first-time scifi novelist is extraordinary in a notoriously difficult genre to break into.
More to the point, Lessig never says “big media is bad”. He points out, correctly, that it is big media companies whom we have to hold most responsible for the radical increase in the purvey of copyright law. And I think anyone who understands the effect that increase in the power of copyright would probably draw the same conclusions about its negative effect. I’ve no doubt that if little media companies, or educational institutions, or an underground network of evil goblins were responsible for the negative influence of a wrongheaded copyright regime, then Lessig’s book would say “How little media, colleges, and goblins use tech and the law…”
It’s almost creepy how someone who’s trying to get *more* people making music, writing books, publishing blogs, and creating films is being described as “hating media”. Valenti is the one who wants to keep me from being able to make films that incorporate key elements of popular culture, not Lessig. Perhaps you all ought to learn more before you criticize.

Gotta give a hearty second to NYC Eats, but I’m biased.

Sneddon has done this before, and it’s the best evidence of Jackson’s claims that the charges are Sneddon allowing extortion to further his careeer. Ten years ago, Sneddon was doing the same thing, granting interviews and basically carrying on in a manner completely inappropriate for someone in his role. Not to say that Jackson’s behavior isn’t completely inappropriate, but I can’t help but think that someone pursuing charges this serious would behave more responsibly.

It’s truly bizarre how fixated Calcanis is on you guys, especially his inexplicable vituperation towards Nick. I mean, there’s healthy competition, but anyone who’s ever been in business in a nascent industry knows that success for your competitors is generally *good* for business if they’re growing the entire market you’re in. And, frankly, Gawker alone has done more to grow the market than everything Calcanis has done collectively.
More to the point, why would you antagonize people who could potentially be your biggest promoters? Separate from any charges of cliquishness or partisanship, pissing people off is just bad business, ain’t it?

Just as an additional note, you may want to just copy and paste one of the default Movable Type templates into the system (you can get it here: http://www.movabletype.org/default_templates.shtml#main_index ) and then you could just edit a stylesheet like Plain Jane ( http://www.movabletype.org/default_styles.shtml#plainjane ) and tweak it to look like your current design. I’m sure one of your more tech-savvy users might wanna help you out. :)

There’s two ways to do the mobile version of your site. If you want to be tech-fancy, you can use style sheets (they work just like style sheets in print, specifying how parts of your site look) and any mobile device which understands them can get instructions that say “the side rail isn’t visible on this device”.
The simpler way, which I’d recommend, is to just go into the “Templates” screen in Movable Type, click on the “create new index template” link, give the new template a name like “mobile” and an output file like “mobile.html” and then you can paste in your regular template that you’ve copied over from your existing index template. Delete the stuff that’s on your sidebar, get rid of that column in your design, and you should be good to go.

“Why don’t we try a little forgiveness?” Well, I wish people would, but I think there’s a sad/broken dynamic in the political part of the blogosphere (mostly warbloggers) where everyone wants to participate in groupthink. There’s a lot of reasons, ranging from the human and understandable want to participate in a larger trend, to the ego-driven (and also understandable) hope that talking about the topic du jour will result in a link from Instapundit.
The unfortunate result of such things, and I’ve been on Easterbrook’s side of it, though fortunately never to the extent of having it cost me my job, is that people pile on before they’ve thought critically about something without realizing the repercussions of all their ranting. I worry about Easterbrook, not for his career, but for the personal impact it has to have a lot of people impugning his motives even before they’ve even stopped to really read his words and understood them.
Warbloggers, heal thyselves!

I have to wholeheartedly second the respect and admiration for Dan Bricklin’s accomplishments and modesty. Meeting him was probably one of the few times I’ve been nervous to talk to someone I “knew” through their blog, and he was so welcoming and kindhearted that it was even more of a pleasure than I’d hoped. Glad to hear you felt the same.

Wow, Americans might be generous, but some of us are assholes for rambling into Euro-bashing on what could have been a heartwarmingly positive thread. Do you guys visit Santa at the mall and tell him how much you hate those Frogs?

It’s sort of off-topic, but these crazy militia men really get my goat. If they’re so interested in respsecting individual property rights against the federal government, why don’t they give their land back to the native people from whom it was stolen?

Sorry I didn’t catch your troubles earlier, glad to hear they’re (apparently?) fixed.

I don’t get it, they’re both selective, insular meetings that cost you $500+travel and a weekend. But one’s okay and one’s bad?

I hope they do a good job of reaching out to survey people whose *mental* health was affected, because a lot of people will still only think of physical maladies.

I hope they do a good job of reaching out to survey people whose *mental* health was affected, because a lot of people will still only think of physical maladies.

You’re not an American if you’re hyphenated.
And here you reveal the flaw in the game. I can’t *not* be seen as hyphenated. I don’t have a choice. Even if I don’t bring it up, I’m still seen by the majority of Americans as either “not American at all” or as a hyphenated American. I don’t have the choice you do, I’m not born with the privilege you don’t even understand you have. And then, stuck without this choice, you say I’m not an American, and you see how I lose. I’m not an American by those standards either way.
So first of all, fuck you. I’m an American. Second of all, “This belief

Those are all valid points, but how does me retaining my identity as the son of Indian parents have anything to do with me being American? If anything, being the son of immigrants makes me “more” American, if there even is such a thing. The phrase “white privilege” seems to be undefined here, but I was using it in the more typical academic sense, which is a reflection of the fact that there are benefits that accrue to people simply for being white, though I’ll readily admit that many ethnic whites have historically been denied those rights until modern times.
Still not sure what I’m talking about? Try looking into the statistics on the percentage of black and white households at the same income level who are accepted from home mortgage loans.

Hey, I’d love to lose the hyphen, just as soon as I’m treated the same as people who have the luxury of not being asked where they’re from. I’m not surprised a bunch of old (prematurely grey! :) white guys don’t see the value in having an ethnic identity in addition to being proud of being American. It’s the same group that doesn’t understand the concept of white privilege, for the most part.
Being an American Indian (not a native american, mind you) doesn’t make me a victim, it makes me proud. That so many are unwilling to see the maintenance of distinct ethnic identity within our larger American culture as anything other than either a threat or victimhood speaks to their lack of willingness to embrace the experience of others, not a weakness on the part of people like me who have no choice but to hold onto our identity. All parts of our identity.

I don’t know, I think there’s a middle ground. My reaction to the attacks is to still be inclined towards grief and remembrance, both quiet emotions. But they’re not about being a victim, it’s about focusing more on the ~2800 people we lost instead of the 19 hijackers. When I visited the site, I didn’t get angry (though obviously, i’ve been angry about many parts of the whole situation over the past 2 years) because I was too focused on grieving for the people we lost there.
Despite what Glenn says, honoring those we lost is an appropriate and important way to remember the day. We can spend the other 364 days of the year revelling in war. Whatever stigma you want to attach to the word “victim”, the reality is that thousands of people were killed, and proud memory does not require loud anger.
I understand that’s been your reaction, but why would you want to enforce that mode of remembrance on those of us who might honor these people differently?

If any of you need help setting up Movable Type to include author names, please let me know and I can send along the template you need for the feed or can give you tips on including the info on your site.

After talking to Mark, I realize I should clarify what I mean about “useful” online aggregators.
In general, the most successful model for online aggregation will probably be more of a media outlet format than a software application format. I feel pretty strongly that a magazine-style publication which utilizes aggregation technology without exposing the “plumbing” and technology behind it will be critical to the mainstream success of the features currently performed with syndication formats.
Also, I think that, so far, the focus on technology has been a miserable way to introduce people to these benefits. One of my main goals in being involved with the Atom effort is to make a user experience that works for normal non-geek users, and I’m not sure we have syndication standards in place yet that let those features work as seamlessly as they should.
So maybe you shouldn’t be talking to Microsoft, Jeff, maybe you should be talking to The Week. Or Nick Denton. :)

I would also hasten to point out that Greg Reinacker’s done a fantastic job of integrating syndication (RSS & Atom) into Outlook with his NewsGator product. He’s also marketing and promoting the product well, and bundling it with useful feeds.
NewsGator and FeedDemon are two outstanding products on the PC side, finally the equal of NetNewsWire on the Mac, and given that Microsoft’s not going to put significant addition development resources into the IE client until the next major version of Windows ships in 2 or 3 years, those are the most realistic bet for aggregation success right now, unless someone makes a truly useful online aggregator. A well-designed web app could be as effective as an IE-integrated program.

Interestingly, one of the few really compelling, personal candidate weblogs I’ve seen is by a California gubernatorial candidate, despite that race’s reputation for lunacy. See here:
http://gruenerforgovernor.typepad.com/

Interesting thing about Jimmy’s background is that he’s a consultant, not a journalist. If he were a journalist, I bet he’d have researched a few examples, and I could have given him, oh, about 100 companies off the top of my head who are using business blogs.

Yep, I got suckered, which is even worse because I saw other pictures that showed the blackout area wasn’t so neatly defined. Definitive debunking here:
http://www.snopes.com/photos/blackout.asp

I like how we had 3000 people die, the French responded the next day by saying “we are all Americans”, and then they have 10,000 people die and the response is “The Frogs must be wimps.” You’re right, the French have a monopoly on being arrogant assholes.

I didn’t understand how it could happen either, until I read this MetaFilter thread where you can see it’s a combination of unusual weather (if we got up to 125 degrees here, people would start dying), some cultural problems, and an almost complete lack of air conditioning.
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/27692

Just wanted to throw in some quick answers to a lot of your concerns. First, sorry I missed telling you when you were free to review the service, the email went out to the beta testers list and it’s my fault you weren’t on that list.
We don’t support FTP output in the current version because we found that any user who even knew what FTP is, let alone had their own server which enabled it, was interested in Movable Type and something they could control on their own server. There may be some middle ground, but TypePad’s largely aimed at people who don’t know or care what FTP, Perl, CGI, chmod, or any of that stuff is.
The bandwidth concerns are legitimate for you, but I don’t think your traffic is typical of most weblogs, and we’re certainly open to seeing what makes sense for people’s transfer limits going forward.
Your UI concerns I think reflect the fact that we designed around people using the tool every day, which is a balance against being a very bare interface designed for demos.
The blogroll links ordering is our biggest request. That means we’ll be doing it ASAP, probably right after domain names.
Glad to hear you like a lot about the service. I’d quibble about AOL being a better deal (AOL’s twice the price of the most expensive plan for TypePad, even if you don’t take advantage of any of our discounts. Basic users of TypePad are paying under $4 a month on average, which doesn’t even pay for AOL’s voice blogging add-on.) but I do think users are interested in pieces like blogrolling and stats and photo albums, which distinguishes TypePad a bit.
Finally, we’re bringing large parts of our work on TypePad back into MT Pro, and we plan to put more info on that out as soon as possible. I’m pretty confident MT won’t be squeezed because we’ve got more business, educational, and political users than almost anybody, in addition to all the regular webloggers, and that’s more than enough to keep the product vibrant.

That’s right, he’s confessed, that’s enough for me to consider him guilty. The problem was when he was thrown in jail incommunicado without being accused of a crime, without getting to call a lawyer, and without being arrested.
Find out more about the story and see if you don’t disagree with how he was incarcerated *before* he confessed.

Or, Chris, it could be possible that some of us still think “innocent until proven guilty” is more than just a phrase from cop shows on TV. I still do decry our government for putting him away without due process, and I’d say anyone who doesn’t probably isn’t fit to vote due to their lack of respect for American legal tradition.

“Very many people dislike what they see as the Americanisation of Britain, and they look to the BBC to defend

Charming definition of freedom you’ve got, Peter, where a note in one’s luggage is grounds for anal rape. Tell me, what words can I put on a note in my own private luggage before I get my sentence from you reduced to mere physical assault? Maybe if I just grumble under my breath about the delays at security I only have to have my teeth knocked out?
And Jeff, rhetoric aside, when has the idea "I don’t have a bomb" become a threat? It’s a threat if I say I do, as Gilmor did, and it’s a threat if I say I don’t, as this kid did. Can I not talk about this subject at all without being wished death or imprisonment?

In fairness to Nick and Liz, these are pretty standard promo images that Spring Street picks. They’re just output in batches that are picked without any input from affiliates like Gawker, so the fact that this particular woman was on there is coincidence.
Surely Gawker does not favor blondes, right?

(oop, hit enter too soon.)
I think that there will be interesting things coming from some AOL Journals, just due to the sheer number of people who’ll create them. The whole point of weblogs is that they’re *not* about fantastic technology, but about people’s thoughts.

Wow, I think “copycat bullshit created to see if it could be re-created. [AlwaysOn] is not providing their members with anything they cant get just as easilly anywhere else. they are not providing their users with anything that they have asked for. and once again they are creating something that isnt even half as good as what they are trying to copy.” was *exactly* the criticisms leveled at AO during the business blogging conference.
Go figure.

Aw, c’mon, Jeff, you’re blowing your populist credentials. This guy’s not webloggers’ favorite cartoonist, he’s only even been heard of by one tiny subset of the warblog community, which is one small community in the entire weblog realm.
More people have heard of the inane tech squabbles than this guy, and those are boring and arcane debates. Let’s not let the favor of even mighty Instapundit be presented as anything approaching a consensus among a weblog population now numbering in the millions.

Not actually true, Rafat. The WaPo report came from CBS Marketwatch, which came from an interview that Mark Hurst did at Good Experience. Which was published… on his blog.

It’s nice rhetoric, but I think it’s more a reflection of the fact that (for better or worse) ANSWER is better at promoting and organizing an event, and that this group was sadly lacking in the media savvy to get notice for it. Lack of celebs or supportive college kids is evidence that the message didn’t get to them, not that they don’t care.

Richard, let’s be fair. Glenn may very well have said “heh” in response to Xeni’s piece.
And regarding Dan’s site, I think the lack of comments is the call of his paper, not him personally.

you’re clearly both salivating to see Andrew Sullivan get his
I am? I don’t even read the guy’s site, and I don’t know him personally, either positive or negative. I just want to see the weblog realm credited for the amazing, positive, beautiful things that it builds, not the notches in its belt from the people it’s taken down.

The reason that Andrew should be careful about encouraging the blogosphere as an instrument of destruction is because the blogosphere is what built his current incarnation.

he is worse than the worst of Worldcom or Enron or Anderson because he betrayed the sacred trust of all the people
wrong, wrong, wrong. Jeff, you’re showing an atypical bout of media-centrism here. The Ken Lays, the Worldcoms of this world cost people their pensions, denied them the fruits of their livelihoods. Blair cost two rich guys their jobs, worst case. It’s not even close to being worse. Thousands of people who really feel the financial impact of all the corporate malfeasance are a significantly greater burden than a few more people being skeptical of one newspaper.
Especially since nobody outside of the media business cares about Blair.

I wholeheartedly agree that a document like this should have a vision, but I’m saying that the first draft by a bunch of bureaucrats resulting in an uninspiring mishmash of committee-speak isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, sometimes it’s the first step it takes to get to something as good as our constitution is.
In other words, the United States of Europe don’t seem to be doing much worse than the United States of America were doing at the same point.

Eh, it’s better than the Articles of Confederation, and we didn’t get our second take on that until the Constitution rolled around after a dozen years of screwing around.

A friend who heard it says his explanation was “Basically people writing about themselves because nobody paid them any attention in life”. As opposed to people talking about themselves on the radio because nobody paid them any attention in life.

For a guy who claims to not be P.C., you sure do object to the unvarnished truth a lot. Are you saying that guys *don’t* fight (physically fight) more than women?

You guys are great. I’m a proud American, and I should be killed for disagreeing with you schmucks? Please.
Or did you forget already about the “Die Fags” photos of the brilliance that gets written on these bombs? Is that the image of our military that you think ought to be spread? How ’bout the bombs dropped on Iraq that say “Payback for 9/11”, even though there’s nothing to pay Iraq back for in the case of those attacks?
I do enjoy my freedom, thanks. Any reason you’d like to see me killed for doing so? I love that someone who goes by the name “serenity” who’s fond of calling strangers fools would think that I’m ridiculous.

Uh, aren’t we supposed to be the open-minded liberated ones, and they’re the cruelly repressed ones? In most of the world, kissing somebody, especially a kid, is seen as affectionate. It’s only tainted in our eyes because of the attention paid to the small number of despicable pedophile priests.

Given their track record for revealing their ignorance about the conflict they’re involved in, or their homophobia or other biases, it’s probably in their best interests that they not be allowed to write messages that people at home will see.

Seems like she raises some good points about what’s wrong with our media:
We hired somebody on MSNBC recently named Michael Savage. Some of you may know his name already from his radio program. He was so taken aback by my dare to speak with Al -Aqsa Martyrs Brigade about why they do what they do, why they’re prepared to sacrifice themselves for what they call a freedom fight and we call terrorism. He was so taken aback that he chose to label me as a slut on the air. And that’s not all, as a porn star. And that’s not all, as an accomplice to the murder of Jewish children. So these are the ramifications for simply being the messenger in the Arab world.

It’s great that Friedman thinks that’s enough to justify the war, but shouldn’t we be concerned that the President said it was the WMD that justified the war?

Uh, who says we shouldn’t worry about bin Laden? Do these idiots just make everything up that they put in their pre-fab songs?
Iraq was about many things, but it had almost nothing to do with the towers falling. Why do we encourage people to be disingenuous to the point of falsehood by giving them a stage?

“Mr. Sarandon”! Ho ho ho, you sure showed him that a “real man” never has a successful wife. How emasculating to associate him with a woman he loves and lives with.
Ask Mike Hawash if Robbins is right. Oh, wait, you can’t ask Mike. He’s been in federal prison. For weeks. Without being charged. Without having a lawyer. And without the government acknolwedging that he’s even there.

By your logic, people throughout history who have asked, "Why is there injustice?" or "Why is there racism?" were saying by implication that injustice and racism are justified.
Which, of course, is hogwash. Typically the people asking the question are those most interested in solving the problem. You don’t think the sociopolitical causes of anti-Americanism are important to study? You don’t think that’s a necessary step of protecting our (and our kids’) long-term safety, asking why other people’s values seem so opposite of ours?
I find that hard to believe.

Don’t worry, Jim, you know I let you know the moment there’s a whiff of bullshit in the air. We’ve got Team Coverage of Operation Wind-Sniff.

You know the trick where you can tell what an editorial’s really about by reading the last graf? It seems like she only calls out the anti-war side of the country. There’s lip service to both sides the whole way through, and then the conclusion just goes after one side for being un-American. Curious, that.

If you want to talk about glaring omissions, there are about 10x as many Hindus in the world as Jews. But the point still stands.

Wait a minute, conservatives are fun to watch and people love them, but the whole media is controlled and populated with liberals? Hollywood makes the most popular movies in the world, which everyone is enthusiastic about watching, but its creators are super-liberals who are out of touch with normal people?
I smell bullshit. Either the mainstream news media and singers (like the dixie chicks) and actors and writers and directors (like martin sheen or michael moore) are out of touch and unpopular, or you have to concede, as an avowed populist, that America, and the whole world, overwhelmingly choose to watch and listen to liberals and liberal messages.
It wouldn’t be news that the stupid, pandering conservativism (if i were right-leaning, I’d be insulted that they purport that Fox is targeted at me) was increasing in popularity if it weren’t already the accepted standard that most people prefer liberal messages.

Hell, even if you’re in favor of the war, there’s plenty of reasons to hate Bush. Especially his mishandling of the run-up to the war. I say Go, Eddie.

The description on one of the tv networks was “muslim-sounding” last name. I’m curious to see if a disproportiate percentage of army members (especially black army members) are Islamic, especially NOI. Seems like the odds of *any* soldier being muslim, especially black muslim, are higher than for the country as a whole, which makes it more likely that a name would be muslim.
Lazyweb, provide me with statistics!

Their families generally encourage (classical) musical ability, good manners and formal education over athletics (which should never be more than a fun waste of time.
Because classical music has so much more intrinsic value than any other? Puh-lease. Keep in mind, we’re on the site of an avowed populist, and Jeff’s absolutely right in being one: There’s a reason classical music doesn’t sell these days unless it’s being played by someone with a bare midriff.
More to the point, the “model minority” stereotype is no less offensive just because it’s ostensibly positive. There are plenty of asian and jewish kids who are good at sports (keep in mind, even those high-pressure asian parents know their kid has to be good at tennis to appear “well rounded” on a college application) and there are plenty of black kids playing basketball who are “successful, driven, creative and intelligent” and have no delusions about the NBA.
The problem with any reductive generality is that it ignores that people are individuals. The right of an individual not to conform is one of the rights that the left seems particularly predisposed to defending these days. Do you really believe that "the Left would rather murder people en masse than change their precious theories"? Because I live in a very liberal city called New York, that’s just chock-full of people who identify with the political left, and I tell you what: We’re really not in favor of mass murder.
You do a disservice to the values you attempt to promote by addressing groups of people with overly broad and disrespectful stereotypes.
And you don’t think Asians whine? I defy you to listen to the tripe coming from the hard-right fundamentalist religious wackos who are in charge of India, the world’s biggest democracy. It’s scapegoating, why-me-ing and bellyaching of the worst, most pathetic sort. And it’s being used to justify, among other things, the murder of thousands of innocent muslims. Curiously, those muslims aren’t complaining, just hunkering down and trying to keep on doing their thing.

The question is who at CNN made the call. They could easily have just moved the blog to cnn.com if they had any sense at all.
I wouldn’t blame the whole organization, I bet it’s more likely there’s just one timid, gutless middle management type who made this terrible decision.

Eh, horseshit. I don’t make excuses for anything, and I think Joi was being a bit tongue-in-cheek about “personality management”. My site represents an accurate part of me, but it’s only exactly that, *part* of me. I’m sarcastic a lot of the time, just like on my site, but I’m also an actual human being who’s not a jerk a lot of the time, too. That doesn’t seem as amusing on my site, so I don’t tend to do that as often.
I don’t pick fights, I make comments. Interestingly, I’m not anti-war, so I don’t know how I’d pick fights with myself. But assuming that you’re referring to my objection to raving right-wing nutcases, I think the problem is that they are guilty of what they accuse the left of: They whine too much and don’t have a sense of humor, least of all about themselves.
If you can find one example of the behavior you ascribe to me, I’ll gladly admit I was wrong to act that way. Otherwise, as I said, horseshit.

Thanks, Rick. You articulated my point better than I was able.

But where, where, are the moderate Christian voices! (heh) In all seriousness, I don’t hear any prominent christian voices asking to remove the references to god from our currency, our swearing-in processes, the beginnings of our legislative sessions and school days.
In fact, we’ve got a commander in chief in favor of prayer in schools, backed by a party that objects to the equal participation of gays in society based on the same verses of the bible that the radical islamists use to justify their homophobia.
Can you actually argue that the rights of people who aren’t Christian (or, better, of the Judeo-Islamo-Christian faiths) are treated equally to those who are? The point’s not to make you feel ashamed that you’re christian. It’s that I never should have been made to feel ashamed because I’m *not*.
I submit that the reason you’re marginalized as a rational liberal christian is because the people in control of mainstream christian identity are as extremist as the nuts who hijacked the messages of groups like PETA and the NRA.

Amen to that, Oliver. I think most people of the Christian faith in this country really don’t see just how accurately this description fits a large majority of this country.

(The above are the hard lessons I learned when I reacted to the then-recent deaths of Princess Diana and Mother Theresa with my true feelings, which were “well, that’s one less glamorous welfare recipient and one less starvation advocate, sounds like good news to me.”
I realize now, that had Diana only lived to see Charles ascend to the throne, she could have been the first actual example of one of Reagan’s mythical “welfare queens”.)

I don’t think Ito’s afraid of opinions. Indeed, his embrace of unpopular, even radical, opinions is more striking in the context of japanese culture than it is in America where iconoclasm is a tradition.
What I’m hearing is that it’s important to treat legitimately-held opinions with respect, even if one disagrees. Indeed, that’s an important part of being in favor of true democracy, as well. I like Bennett sometimes, too, for saying annoying and interesting things loudly. But I think he does a disservice to the importance of his ideas by frequently being profoundly disrespectful to people who hold contrary ideas in good faith.
A sure way to discourage people from participating is to belittle or berate them when they speak up, and I think those who shout down at others reveal a far greater insecurity and fear of opinions than those who refrain from discourse with the coarse.
Responding to the death of a minister with "Thank God" within a few hours of his death? It’s a strongly-held opinion, sure. But it’s tacky, immature, and ultimately boring. I’ve been far more politically incorrect than Bennett’s ever been, but I strive to not be completely lacking in class.
And I think it’s far braver to be honest enough to recognize that every child *is* special, regardless of what they do or don’t do. I don’t like the Mr. Rogers show, never did, even as a kid. But that man did a lot more to help children grow up happy and healthy than a million posts like Richard’s that you linked to.

Well, yeah, but when they got a couple hundred thousand people together to march here in the city, they weren’t allowed to march, so what do you do? Try to contact the decision-makers through other means.
Seems resourceful to me, the opposite of lazy.

I was just mortified by the timing of the initial story, at close to midnight on a saturday in a smaller-market paper’s weblog during a minor event right before a federal holiday. Maybe the Google PR folks are waiting for the next news cycle to do a formal release on it.

I think I came around to the same point you’re making, although it’s probably cloaked in me being a smart ass. Who cares if someone dominates a niche that isn’t of any interest? I think that the attempts by webloggers to become popular are almost always at the expense of their focus on their true areas of expertise and passion.
That being said, I think that the reason people pay attention to Clay’s research, as opposed to his conclusions, is because they’re still stuck in that “bigger is better” mentality. I wouldn’t trade the few dozen really interesting and intelligent readers I have for a mass audience of people who didn’t care as much about what I write.

To the pleasure of many Mac advocates, Eno admitted that he created the Microsoft Sound on a Mac.

That by holding onto their creations, they are thieves.
Who’s saying that? I call straw-man bullshit on that one.

We’ve had pages designed to catch (and get back in touch with) ego surfers since the earliest days of AltaVista in ’97 or so. I know Andy Baio has had a great one, and I remember one of the old-school software guys had one that predated this, maybe as far back as 1995 or 1996. Certainly pre-Google.
Still a good idea, but I gotta fight the tendency to think every idea should have “google” or “blog” affixed to it so it can be positioned as something new.

Waitaminute, I thought we agreed Ranch one was solid…? How were they ruined? (Admittedly, I haven’t been there in a while.)

It depends; Who’s your hosting company?

I still say the most famous blogger is Prince. But his site has had some tech difficulties lately. Archive of the page is here. He certainly gets the “personal voice” part of it with his spelling, but he’s so obtuse he seems to be missing out on the “transparency” part of blogging.

Eh, this whole AOL blogging thing is un-news. AOL hasn’t announced anything in the pipe, or anything coming up. They just said that the stuff they have now is pretty much the same as weblogs, which is true in a general sense, and completely false in the specifics.
More to the point, saying that “the original tech bloggers” decried new people coming into blogging isn’t just false, it’s disingenuous. They (we?) built these tools for people to use. The biggest threat to blogging isn’t the inevitable rise of easy-to-use, popular tools, the threat is that everybody wants to shoehorn every idea they have into a “revolution in blogging”. Not every personal website is, or ought to be, a weblog.
My new idea is to create a paper weblog, a “plog”. It’s going to be private, though, so the notebook that it’s bound into is going to have a lock on the outside of it. Viva Plogging!

I dunno, if you’re going to discount sites for having style so ugly it detracts from the substance, I think we can all start by boycotting all the blogspot blogs we read, right?

I think the distinction is that squeegee guys are the sign of increasingly aggressive panhandling becoming acceptable. We always have panhandlers, yes. But back when this city *was* dangerous (and just as terribly, *felt* dangerous) the tolerance of men aggressively accosting drivers was a sign that the problem was seen as too big to tackle.
It’s not an entirely arbitrary distinction to make, between the presence of people begging and people essentially extorting strangers.

Less motion does usually compress better, resulting in smaller files. Nice work on your clips, but don’t you think that video blogging would necessitate much less frequent posting? Maybe it’s because I’ve worked in a place that (over-)produced video, but there’s an order of magnitude more choices to be made in producing video than text (much like there’s many more choices to be made with flash than straight HTML) and it’s a rare talent that could do that well and still output posts at the same rate that we do our text entries.
Also, wouldn’t a more typical example of a video blogging segment excerpt some pundit (I am already cringing in advance of badly-excerpted O’Reilly soundbites) and then responding in video?
Worst of all, video doesn’t support links to corroborating or dissenting information. Well, technically, it’s *possible* but the 15 of us in the world that know how to do it know that it’s time-consuming and flaky. HTML works on everything from my phone to my PDA to my PC to my TV. Video formats don’t even reliably work on a top-of-the-line PC sometimes.
In summary? It’s a great idea, but I don’t think it’s likely to take off except as an occasional adjunct to a post.

They’ve actually been planning the blogs for a while. Though there’s still some polishing up to do (I hate those default Radio templates, but their editor likes them.) I think they’ve done a good job of getting the personal tone for a weblog right. Much better than a lot of other professional journos who can’t drop the stilted language when moving to a weblog.
I’m biased, though, I was a strong advocate of the move, working for the CP’s parent company.

You don’t need a streaming server to just server up a Windows Media clip, but there will be limits to how many simultaneous users can be accessing the video with decent performance. Assuming you’re not (yet) into Glenn Reynolds’ traffic numbers, just linking to the file should be fine. That’s how I’m serving this windows media clip, for instance.

I dunno, after I saw him stop on his way onstage during a campaign stop to admire someone’s new Handspring Visor, I was sold. I’d take smart, dull and geeky over charismatic and vacant anyday. I don’t look to the President to entertain me. And I find that geeky, smart people are anything *but* dull.

For anybody using Outlook, I wholeheartedly recommend CloudMark. It’s fast, effective, and doesn’t have all kinds of orwellian false positives like SpamAssassin does. Best spam-fighter ever.

The bad part about not being able to blog Foursquare isn’t that you can’t report the usual foolishness that will be part of the speeches and presentations, but that you can’t tell us the reactions of the others there when they realize that random strangers on the net have made more compelling stuff than all their millions of dollars have been able to build.
Didja let ’em know what you were up to?

(got the jerk thing wrong re: handicapped people. just flip that around.)

Jeff, I think it’s disingenuous to characterize all of the criticisms as being accusations of “political incorrectness”. I’ve been accused of being many things, but *too polite* has never been one of them, and most people who proudly trumpet their political incorrectness aren’t being brave, they’re being rude. Calling a handicapped person exactly that instead of a “cripple” isn’t political incorrectness, it’s being a jerk.
More to the point, the unwillingness of a lot of people to distinguish between the evil elements poisoning Islam and the true dangers can cost people their lives. It can lead to things like Charles justifying hateful literature being placed in front of a house of worship where our fellow Americans go every Sunday. Worst of all, it can lead to these criticisms being seen as the views of extremists.
Maybe my opinion is informed by having had conversations with you in person, but I know you to be a rational, responsible man. If I could only judge you by your willingness to throw in with those who speak in generalities so broad as to be meaningless, I might think you weren’t capable of making such distinctions yourself, and I might use that as cause to dismiss your legitimate criticisms, concerns and fears.
It’s funny that so many came after me, saying I was appeasing radical Islam, when I’m probably more in favor of war against Iraq than you are. But that doesn’t excuse people lumping an NOI member who perpetrated the sniper attacks in with the other Islamic extremists. Perhaps many people aren’t familiar with just how unrelated the two groups are. But inaccuracies here endanger the legitimacy of calls to action elsewhere.
I’ve seen it happen in India, where Muslim terrorism yielded to Hindu terrorism where marauding gangs attacked, pillaged, and raped innocent muslims in their midst. It’s as important that we correctly identify our enemies as it is that we neutralize the threat they pose.

They’re both good points, but I think you could accomplish either with a tablet in laptop mode just as well. You’d just *also* have the option of using the Tablet as a more passive presentation device for books, newspapers, and blogs.
One of the reasons I think the devices will excel at those tasks is because of the ClearType feature built into XP for LCD screens. It makes reading *much* easier and downright usable for longer reading like an entire book. Of course, that’s available for XP on existing LCD laptop screens or desktop monitors, too.

I remember you making this argument when we had this conversation in person, and it gave me pause at the time. Since then, I’ve seen that all but one of the Tablet PC models being released next week do have keyboards, they’re just able to tuck them underneath the screen when they’re in tablet mode. So they do all the normal laptop stuff, too.
That being said, I’d think anybody with a love for journalism and weblogs would like tablets just as a pure reading device. Sit on the sofa, click through your blogroll, and read with the thing propped up on your lap. Much more civilized than hunching over a monitor facing away from your kids while you catch up on everyone’s sites.

I hate to comment on a final word, and believe me, after death threats and accusations of all sorts of vile anti-semitism and anti-americanism and support for terrorists, I’m more bored and done with this thing than anywone. But I feel there’s an important part of Bennett’s statements that he’s missing. I *do* agree that mainstream Islamist tendencies are towards espousing violence and are preaching negativity and hate. That’s why I want to make sure that the people trying to shed light on those evils seem credible and sane.
Given the vitriol and threats I’ve recieved, a strong case can be made for the anti-Islamist extremism cause having been hijacked by zealots who make the legitimate points look like the viewpoint of bigots.
Bennett accuses me of a viewpoint I don’t have. Then he says Charles has an opposite viewpoint, making Charles right and me wrong. The problem is, Charles and I don’t disagree on most political points, just on the importance of disassociating an important message from some xenophobes who might try to co-opt it.
I appreciate the comments option being here to respond, and I hope I don’t draw your site into the same pattern of confrontation that’s followed this discussion elsewhere.

Jeff, you raise good points about IHT as a print paper, but what about their beautiful web site? Don’t you think we should lobby for the site and its elegant design to continue as the Internet version of whatever future effort they put out? I’d hate to see that site shuttered in favor of the lesser offerings of any of the supporting papers.

Barry, I think a lot of the comment conversation happened over on my cross-posting of this essay on my blog: http://dashes.com/anil/2011/07/if-your-websites-full-of-assholes-its-your-fault.html

Great post, Om, and thanks for the high praise. I think in short, blogs are going to do what they always do: Decentralize giant networks that have become unresponsive to the needs of their users and audiences. Today’s mainstream social networks look a lot like yesterday’s mainstream media — they might well face the same pressure from blogs that their predecessors did.

“I’ve been running my personal blog on TypePad since 1993”

My first thought was, “my god, have I really been doing this that long?!” :) But I think you probably mean 2003. Thanks for having been a loyal member so long, and thanks even more for the thoughtful look at all of our new efforts.

It’s so cool how those connections play out over the years. The best thing is that everybody you’ve mentioned is still out there trying new things and being entrepreneurial, including you! :)

Thinking of you and hoping you’re doing well. Less smokes, more jokes!

Just to be clear, despite displaying cached blog pages, there is no data lost on TypePad. we’ll be republishing the pages to bring them current now that the service is back up.

“Boy, I hope they don’t use Typepad. We all know what that means, don’t we Om? ;-) ”

Hey, share the joke with the whole class! :-|

Hey Dean, was surprised to not see mention of Apple's Game Center here. It's obviously a huge competitive pressure, as well as a strong incentive for Aurora to make themselves cross-platform as a differentiator. Any reason it was omitted from the piece?

Glad to see such interest in the idea! It was great to meet you, Jeff, and hopefully folks can understand that, just like software, some humans are able to be improved and have their bugs fixed over time by a community. I hope I can be judged by the present, as Benjamin has done, as opposed to the past, as I suspect we’ve all made mistakes or had our actions misinterpreted at some point over the years.Report

The East River is very clean these days. It’s still busy enough with shipping traffic that most people don’t swim in it, but I see people fishing there every day, and many eat their catch. Let’s not perpetuate outdated ideas about the level of pollution of particular flows.

The East River is very clean these days. It’s still busy enough with shipping traffic that most people don’t swim in it, but I see people fishing there every day, and many eat their catch. Let’s not perpetuate outdated ideas about the level of pollution of particular flows.

My sense is that this very primitive implementation that I've done is probably *not* the most useful thing to do with this technique. I'm just hoping to inspire someone more creative to come up with a good reason to do this. 🙂