Category: Random

My new Powerbook was shipped way earlier than I expected and I now find myself routinely checking its progress across the world every two or three hours. It started off in Taipei – a place I’ve never been – and then travelled across the world to Luxembourg – another place I’ve never been. When we finally meet, it will be as two explorers who have explored the world – weary and ready to settle down…

There’s another round of discussion going on post-FOOCamp about combatting spam by increasing transaction costs for e-mail. I’m not going to get too involved in it, because I’ve had many of the arguments before – most often with the lovely Cory Doctorow, but in a nutshell, my position is that there are many situations in online life where the effective removal of marginal cost has created problems in handling massive the subsequent massive amounts of abuse that such systems are prone too. I’m not convinced that building in restrictions into e-mail is particularly desirable, but there are lots of other situations where creating artificial scarcity and building-in increasing marginal costs (even if they are only in effort) might have significant positive impacts.

Here’s some of the older posts I’ve written on these subjects:

• Bringing the Scale back
• Abusability (read the ongoing discussion in the comments)
• By way of a response to Cory Doctorow
• Another response from Cory Doctorow
• On the manufacturing of scarcity
• Yet again manufacturing scarcity
• On increased and exponential marginal cost

Today I’m launching a new site – my first full new site under my own steam for a couple of years. Everything in Moderation is a new site designed to find creative ways to manage online communities and user-generated content. I’ll be writing up some of my experiences with Barbelith Underground, particularly some of the interesting anti-troll solutions that we came up with, as well as talking about models of full or partially distributed moderation systems to compete with things like Slashdot. I’m quite excited about the prospect and look forward to getting a lot of site suggestions to write about from people like you – Mr and Mrs Everyman!

In lieu of real content, while I try and drag my lungs back together from the scrabbly little bits I can see around my sitting room floor attached to scraps of tissue paper, here’s a picture of Caterina and me at the Lego place in Helsinki from earlier this year…

So I’ve been feeling really run-down for the last couple of weeks, but – hey – you know – who doesn’t. Anyway I thought if Matt and I stopped working so hard for a couple of days and just let our minds and bodies catch up with the world, then I’d feel a bit better and I decided to end one of those days by going out for a couple of drinks. And – I’ll admit it – I had a couple of cigarettes. And then I woke up this morning unable to stand properly and with a throat that the flu fairy had attacked with a rusty old cheese-grater. Anyway, I went to work anyway because clearly having days off is evil and wrong and only lightweights do it. I bought loads of pills and took loads of pills and just about managed to get through the day and get home before promptly barfing all over the place and collapsing exhausted onto the sofa. I am, it seems, officially ill.

As this has clearly been building for a while now, I think I’m going to assume that it’s the reason that I’ve felt so enervated and unable to accomplish anything for the last couple of weeks. So – taking advantage of the fact that I’ve now been lying on my sofa for three hours solidly without really moving at all and have therefore built up some typing energy – I’m going to (1) briefly apologise for the lack of posts recently (2) say thank you to the lovely person who bought me Nowhere off my wishlist (unless I bought it for myself (which it occurs to me it quite possible, although I don’t remember doing it) and (3) look rather surprised at myself for having just accidentally bought a Powerbook on the day that they announced the shipping date for Panther.

Oops! Here comes lunch again. Best be off.

Matt Haughey writes about putting Google AdWords on PVRBlog:

Make no mistake, last month PVRblog made a lot of money from Adsense. When was the last time you heard someone say they received a check for advertising on their hobby site that could be used to purchase a fully loaded Aeron chair? Sounds like something you might have heard in 1998, no? Well it’s true today, and I hope a lot more people meet with the same success.

Haughey’s experience sounds very intriguing and his tips for running a successful Adsense-based semi-commercial venture may very well gesture in the right direction for niche commercial weblogging enterprises. I’ve never been very comfortable with the idea of getting money from weblogging, because I’ve always felt that there was a distinction between getting sponsorship for what one writes and getting advertising based upon what/who one is. Weblogs have seemed to be to be a space in which individuals could self-describe and – as such – putting advertising upon them has felt to me rather like being prepared to sell parts of one’s face or body for commercial advertising purposes.

Today at the iSociety event, Cameron articulated a useful and simple distinction between a publishing model of weblogs where a specific site is (to a greater or lesser extent) impersonal and subject-focused (which is – I think – the only part journalists seem to understand), and a social model where the site is no more or less than a representation of a person online and connects with other sites around itself as a proxy for a social connection to the person behind the keyboard. That we can understand weblog space as being a spectrum like that (with people like Mark Pilgrim occupying this weird Schroedinger-like superposition between concept and human) makes it much easier for me to conceive of a comfortable place for this kind of commercial weblogging venture.

Today – after receiving a few more pseudo-comments from people whose home URLs contain the word “blowjob” – I also received the following:

If you don’t want certain types of homepages listed such as ones about sex then you need to turn off allowing homepage url’s to be listed with the comments. I don’t know what your problem is with sex sites, perhaps you are a victorian or a religious fanatic, beats me, but you do have the option to turn off homepage url listing with the comments.

The interesting thing about the person who decided to leave this message (which like so many was stuck on the end of my piece about the evils of weblog comment spammers) was that they don’t seem to be able to to understand the difference between someone engaging in a conversation and someone coming into your space and trying to sell you something. And they don’t seem able to understand that taking advantage of other people’s good-will to whore your own products and services is innappropriate – that it’s wrong.

The reason – obviously – that webloggers allow individuals to put links to their homepages in their comments is so that we can strengthen links and ties between the members of our heavily abstracted community. We do it so that if people find a comment interesting they can go and read more about the person who commented. The cynicism involved in using such things for pure Google-juice – just to try and scrabble people to your porno site for a few extra cents – is just disgusting. And it’s not because it’s pornography, it’s because it’s brazen, disrespectful and offensive.

I’m trying to find a good strategy for resolving this situation, but in the meantime I’m just going to change the URLs to pages about the evils of spamming, if I don’t just delete them. I’ll try and collate some useful links as soon as I am able.

I can’t quite believe I’m doing this, but if you are in the United Kingdom and if you’re not going outside and getting drunk or having a big party of something, could you please ring 09011 212 210 and cast your trashmatic Fame Academy vote for the wonderful Alex. I wouldn’t normally ask, but this is really important… Sigh…

And thank God! She’s won! Bloody wonderful! That’s really cheered me up. Thanks everyone for being useful and voting for her! The ‘staff’ look pretty happy too, which is probably because they’ve been saved from Sneddon-like embarrassment. Good stuff. Good stuff.

Here’s three pieces of advice that apply as much to moderators and administrators of message boards as much as to the people who are unfortunate enough to have you as unduly elected presidents for life. The first piece of advice I have been reminded of again recently. It’s nice and simple and is profoundly important: Don’t post angry. The second piece of advice is about the content of your posts: Argue the issue, not the person. And the third and final piece of advice is about how you argue your point: The art of winning arguments is all about seeming to be the more reasonable party.

Anyone who has passed by Broadcasting House in recent months will have noticed that it has been carefully gift-wrapped in white sheeting and scaffolding. Underneath the chrysalis it’s hard to guess what’s going on, but from the otherside – from inside the Portland Place part of the structure – you can see a lot more… This view is looking southwards toward Oxford Circus. Check out the little tiny diggers at the bottom of the picture. They’re on the third or fourth story! Neat, huh?