Disorderly Content

Yes, that really was my first blog post in a very long time. My only excuse is that I've been busily tweeting, once I discovered how easy it was to use my Twitter posts to update my Facebook status. I wonder if I can wire that stuff to here. Granted, the posts will be short, but short is better than nothing, right? True, that claim didn't do much for my dating life, but maybe this'll be different. Or not.

A professional blogger, that is. Why? What did you think I meant?

Last night was our monthly blogger non-meetup. A non-meetup because I would hate to violate somebody's trademark, and since Meetup.com started charging, we started deciding that we could meet just as well without their permission. Anyway, there we were in the local non-Starbucks coffee shop. (And yes, you can get coffee from somewhere other that Starbucks. Good coffee too.) And among all the usual suspects there was a new player. New but awfully familiar looking, until I realized he looks like a younger Aasif Mandvi from the Daily Show. But he's not Aasif Mandvi; he's the Silicon Alley Insider's first employee in Silicon Valley, a brand new professional blogger. And, shockingly enough, he fit right into our assortment of strangeoids and oddballs and ne'er-do-wells. (Which am I, I wonder. Or am I *shock* *horror* all of the above?) The conversation wandered far and wide, as it generally does, although new guy (sorry, I've already forgotten your name - Vox?), Elke and I talked a bit about the sad fate of newspapers, new guy being a recovering journalism major.

Oh, and how did he find us? Turns out Valleywag includes us in their little roundup of interesting things going on around these parts. Imagine! Us, interesting!

Of course, it could just be a misprint...

One thing about the Web is that it doesn't stand still. Remember in the early days of the Internet, when you weren't anybody until you had an email address? And then it was a website; without a website you just didn't matter. And then your own domain. Then it was blogs. And now it's podcasts, both audio and more recently video.

Which is where I draw the line. I'm okay with myself as a writer, but I couldn't imagine having my voice go out over the wire. (Or wireless for that matter.) As for video, well, I may not have the voice for radio but I certainly have the face for it. So I figured that would be that, just this far and no further. Words. Still pictures. But nothing more.

Yeah, well, I guess I was wrong. Again. Because somehow I've ended up as guest voice on somebody else's podcast. Which, I hasten to add, wasn't my idea at all. It was all an accident.

It all goes back to my Farscape fixation, as so many things do. And specifically to The Scapecast, a new podcast some fellow Scapers put together. It seemed not the best of ideas, a bunch of fans talking about their obsession. Cringeworthy, even. So I wasn't going to listen. Except that somebody talked me into it, and I was surprised that even the first couple of episodes were both well produced technically and interesting listening. And then there was a fan get-together in Berkeley, where one of the hosts of the podcast got us to record some bumpers for the show. And that led to my being asked to record a piece for an episode. But just just any piece; I had to try to recreate Brando's immortal Don Vito for a fan-created alien character. (No, I can't explain it any better than that.) And then I was asked to become a quasi-Mr. Hooper for a Sesame Street-inspired bit of lunacy. Followed by a long dissertation on the shippiest of shippy relationships, for which I was permitted to use my own natural tones. The rest, as they say, is history.

Okay, not really. But having contributed to the last three episodes, I'm beginning to appreciate what voice actors go through, to say nothing of all those ADR sessions the Farscape cast did. And I wonder what the Scapecasters'll hit me with next. Or whom...

A few years ago (yes, it's now officially "a few years") I worked at a startup that in retrospect never had a chance. Okay, to be honest it wasn't just in retrospect; I started having doubts, and then certainties, while I was still there. But it wasn't all bad. Among the few positives was meeting Barry Eisler, then a contract lawyer turned Silicon Valley exec, now a writer of most excellent thrillers. I'm still in touch with a few of my coworkers from that job, but I'm definitely closest to Barry and his family.

Whenever Barry and I talk, the conversation is lively and far reaching. His books betray his quick mind and contrary nature, which I mean in the best possible way. I'm an unconverted small-L liberal; he'd probably best be described as a libertarian. So we don't always agree, although I flatter myself that we each gain something from our debates.

As Barry's book career has flourished, he's enjoyed meeting other writers and interacting with reviewers and readers. (I'd call them fans, but I don't want to presuppose.) I got the blogging bug early, and like every other person who gets religion, did my damnedest to evangelize him. It is to his credit (or is it just stubbornness?) that he resisted so well and for so long.

Until now, that is. I just got an email from Barry to announce that he's taken the plunge and entered the realm of bloggerdom. You'll find the first entry on his website. Like the rest of his writing, and his conversation for that matter, it's well thought out, articulate and likely to offend a fair few people. I can't wait to read the next installment.

Tonight was the night of our semimonthly blogger non-Meetup at Barefoot Coffee Roasters in... Cupertino? It was the usual congenial group around the big round table, with the conversation racing hither and yon as it is wont to do. I was among the few not taking advantage of the free WiFi, which I grant is a lot easier if you actually have a computer with you. Elke and Elasaid were blogging in real time, as opposed to the imaginary, or at least complex, time in which the rest of us dwell. I got to congratulate Elasaid about her appearance, or at least the auditory equivalent, on an episode of Cinecast, one of my favorite podcasts. And also about her new job at Tivo, which will start in another week or so. And Elke and I riffed on men's basic fear of women, which I said explained why we never look women in the eye. Our lowered gaze is out of respect and fear, not the mammary fixation of which we're always accused. Hey, it's just a theory!

I refer not to Shakespeare, but to Valleywag, the latest blog effort from Gawker Media. Aspiring to do for Silicon Valley what Wonkette does for Washington, so far all it's done is demonstrate that Silicon Valley gossip is a contradiction in terms. Granted, they've only been publishing a few days, but really! If whining about the free snacks at Google and Steve Jobs somehow getting by without license plates is the best you can do, how long can it be before the only sound you year is that of dozens of RSS readers deleting their feed? My advice: read it now while you can. It's better than Sominex if you're having trouble sleeping.

The title of this post is in honor of Mille Bornes, a French card game I used to play as a kid. The name translates to One Thousand Milestones, and refers to the stone markers along French roadways. Anyway, that's all irrelevant except for the fact that this blog has reached a milestone itself. Yep, my last post was number 500, which puts me halfway to my own mille bornes. It took sixteen months to get there, which works out to 1.02 posts per day. Pretty dedicated, I'd say. And that doesn't count the 240 music reviews on my other blog, which started just a couple of weeks before this one, or all the other stuff I've added to my website since then. Wonder how long the next 500 will take.

I've just been reading a couple of the funniest websites. And I'd be happy to tell you all about them, if I hadn't agreed to participate in the first annual Blogger Sweeps Week. You haven't heard about the faBSW? Not surprising, really, since we sort of invented the whole thing at our South Bay Blogger !Meetup last week. Anyway, it means I'm saving the good stuff for the first week in February. So if everything you read here between now and then is kind of lame, that's why. It's not because I don't have anything interesting to say. Nope, not that at all.

One downside of being at liberty (a gentle euphemism for "unemployed") is that holidays lose much of their appeal. You don't get time off. And worse, instead of enjoying the freedom of shopping or touring when everybody else is trapped inside, you get to fight with desperate crowds of people wherever you go. But that's not what made these particular holidays stressful or why I'm glad we're past the Nonsectarian Winter Holiday Season^TM. No, I'm glad to get back into some of the happier aspects of my routine.

Like our twice monthly South Bay Blogger gatherings. (Which used to be Meetups... or is that Meetsup? But that's another digression.) Things were quieter in November, as several of the regulars were tied up with NaNoWriMo. And in December there are always schedule conflicts with holiday events. So it was nice to show up at Barefoot Coffee Roasters last night and see the usual gang. And to chat about both the significant and the irrelevant for a few hours.

It was the usual mixed bag of conversational topics. Elke mentioned in passing that she'd disabled the RSS feed on her blog, which explained why I thought she'd given up blogging for Lent. (Lent isn't in December? Well, you know what I mean.) So now I have to check her blog manually every so often, which is terribly inconsiderate on her part. Okay, not really, not on the scale of the Bush Administration's ability to be inconsiderate. But still.

Newish blogger David made only his second visit to the group. He's a recent arrival from Nebraska, enjoying I hope his first Silicon Valley winter. He's all excited about how his AdSense revenues are climbing, and talked about how adding a donation button to his blog may have caused people to start clicking on his ads as a way of rewarding him without actually having to put up any cash. An interesting theory. Not that I'd ever suggest that anyone click through on an ad unless you were really, truly interested in the product being advertised. Or at least curious to see what's at the other end. Or both, I suppose.

I should mention that Rich, Antwon and Ealasaid were also there and in their usual good form. Wait, I guess I just did. Oh, and Antwon had the idea that we should do a blogging sweeps week, just like the networks. We settled on the first week of February, which means you can expect a series of Very Special Episodes of our blogs, as we save the non-crappy stories for then. Or not; we'll see how it goes.

Oh, what did I talk about? What didn't I talk about? Topic one was my brand new job, and the strangeness of being the only person in a local office and waiting for somebody to tell me something about anything. I should enjoy the quiet, though. I have a feeling it won't last.

This time last month I was blogging about how cool it was to have my letter read on the Cinecast podcast. Yeah, it's bragging. But if you can't brag on your own blog, I mean, what's the point in having a blog in the first place? So this is gonna be another of those posts. In fact, it's remarkably like the last one. Yep, Sam and Adam read another of my letters. You can download Cinecast #59 and listen or scroll your way to 28:25. Or you can skip all that other stuff (do you really need to hear about Aeon Flux?) and grab the good parts version.

Sorry for that shocking display of non-humility. I promise the next couple of posts won't be about me. Probably.

I was listening to the latest edition of Cinecast, Sam and Adam's weekly movie review podcast. And was surprised and pleased when they read my email about their review of Capote. You can hear it for yourself if you're so inclined; it comes about 21:44 into episode #52. Or you can grab my two minutes of the show, cut from the cast with an app called MP3 Trimmer.

I'm sure you're as excited as I am about my moment of semi-demi-hemi-fame. What can I say? I'm easily impressed. As I hope, dear reader, are you.

David at Joho the Blog links to Isabel Walcott's blog, where she displays a great cartoon from The New Yorker on blogging and asks if all this attention to blogging and bloggers (but not to this one or this one, or at least not nearly enough of it) means that the bloom is off the rose, it's all over but the shouting and other cliches. (I refuse to use the Fonzie's motorcycle stunt one on general principle. Yes, I do so have principles!) She's probably right, although I'm hoping that, like web pages, after the bubble bursts it'll go back to people doing it for their own amusement and that of a few friends. Podcasts; that's where the real money is! Right?

Despite my disappointing time at the zoo, the day wasn't a total loss. Last night was one of our twice-monthly blogger Meetups, which was more mellow than the last one but still a whole lot of fun. Got to try out Courtney's new Nikon D50, a smaller and lighter version of the D70 I've been using. Debated a name for Elke's new plastic duck; D. Arthur was suggested and approved by acclimation. (The D may stand for Disco; that point is still subject to further discussion.) We even got into a discussion about blogging, something that happens surprisingly rarely for a blogger Meetup. In particular, for whom do we write? Rich says he writes primarily for his blogger friends. Me, I write for people who don't know me; there's always a chance I can impress them. Okay, a small chance. A very small chance.

Oh, and we had some new participants. I'll rely on Elke to provide their particulars. But welcome, guys; you got into the spirit of the thing with no prompting at all!

Update 07/06: I said we could count on Elke. And we all know, I'm never wrong.

I have to give credit to Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing. After writing a diatribe about Apple inserting DRM restrictions into the podcasts it offers with the latest version of iTunes, and then discovering that nothing of the kind actually happened, he left his original words on the blog and crossed them all out. That way we know what he thought and what he knows now. Given how easy it is to change the record (as I wrote about in this post from February), he has my respect for not doing so. I'm not sure I'd be so forthright about my own conclusion-jumping.

(Disclaimer: I do reserve the right to fix typos and spelling errors. Nothing sacrosanct about them.)

Best. Meetup. Ever.

Our twice-monthly blogger Meetup was last night. And as occasionally happens, all the stars were in sync, all the drugs peaked at the same moment, and a good time was had by all. Why "Naked Bea Arthur"? I hear you cry. Elkit has attempted to serialize the events that led to that phrase becoming the theme of the evening, from her reference to Harold & Maude, which led to my mention of the other Maude. Which someone, I won't say who, prepended with naked, leading to searches for available domain names¹, searches for images and eventually the creation of the first song by that soon to be superstar group, Antwon & The Antwonettes. No, it doesn't make sense. And no, it didn't make sense at the time. That's what was so great about it.

1. We determined that nakedbearthur.com is indeed free for purchase. As is nakedgoldengirls.com, although there were some concerns about alternate interpretations.

Update 06/19: It is with great pride that I note that this very blog entry is now the first and the second result from a Google search for that particular phrase, with my partners in crime claiming the third, fourth, sixth and seventh slots. Then again, I'm easily impressed.

You may have noticed a huge gap between my last blog entry and this one. For the first time since I got hooked on this blogging thing, I went on an actual vacation. To Australia of all places, about which I will have much to say and lots of pictures to help you ignore all the words I use to say it.

Anyway, despite the presence of Internet cafes all over Oz, or at least the cities and towns worthy of the term (and a few that barely qualify as hamlets), I managed to avoid connecting to the net for almost my entire trip. Which means, of course, that my RSS newsreader wasn't getting any exercise. And boy, did it make me pay!

Facing more than 600 unread entries in the blogs I read regularly is more than I can bear. (I'm down to 162 unread as I type this.) And that means pruning the list. Time to get this obsession under control! Besides, the more time I spend reading, the less time I have for writing. And that's a bad thing. (The imbalance, not the writing.)

I don't remember when I discovered Meetup, but I know it was a long, long time ago. Might have heard about it in connection with my ongoing Farscape fixation. Not that it did any good; in all the time I was a member, nobody ever managed a Farscape Meetup here in the Heart of Technology. Eventually I got tired of the monthly reminders about the lack of Scaper interest in Meetups, or Meetup-er interest in Farscape. Or whatever.

And then I started blogging. And some mention somewhere got me thinking about Meetup again. Which led to the discovery that there are blogger Meetups. And those actually happen! Twice a month, if you can believe it. And even better, they'll even indulge me and talk about Farscape a little if I ask nicely.

So this is a shoutout to the other blogging Meetup-ers, or Meetup-ing bloggers. (Or whatever.) To Elke, our steamed moderator. (We meet at coffee houses. It's sort of a joke.) And Rich and Courtney. And Fling, who isn't really called Fling. Except in places like this, of course.

I'm tied up in product training at work this week, which is playing havoc with my blogging time. But I've been reading several other blog entries about a Google employee who was sacked, presumably (at least these bloggers say) because of his blog about his job. That's now been confirmed by Google Blogoscoped. But what I didn't know and find particularly interesting is that this wasn't a Google employee who suddenly decided to blog. No, this guy started writing on day one of the job. And it didn't take long at all for his employer to object, first by insisting that details they considered proprietary be removed from his blog, and finally by letting him go. His entire history with the firm was a matter of a few weeks.

It's a sad reality that bears acknowledgment: that an individual's right to free speech doesn't trump a company's right to determine what's said about it. At least where people on its payroll are concerned.

Update 02/11: You can read the story from the man himself. I'd describe his surprise at Google's reaction as rather naive. Then again, if I'd had access to the Web at the start of my career, my displays of dumbth would have been a lot more public than they were.

A little admin note for the handful of folks reading this blog with an RSS aggregator like NetNewsWire for the Mac. After noticing that another blogger had a [Comments] tag at the end of his postings, I decided to examine his XML and see if I couldn't do the same to mine. The nice thing about using Blosxom for my blog is that it's so transparent; I can change anything I want with a little bit of editing. So now I have that [Comments] tag too. Now all I need are a few more people to actually write something. (More readers would be nice too.)

I've been using this wonderful RSS aggregator called NetNewsWire to keep up with a long list of favorite blogs. One of the nice features of NetNewsWire is its handling of changes to blog entries. If you enable it, NNW will show both the old text in red, the new text in green and the unmodified text, well, unmodified. Usually the changes are no big deal: typos, grammatical corrections, that sort of thing. Sometimes they include updates to the original story, tagged with the word Update so browser people and users of less clever RSS tools will know. But sometimes the story undergoes a real transformation.

Case in point: this posting on Engadget. Read the story now and you'll learn about a product from Japan that lets you whistle for your lost remote. But that's not what it said when it showed up in NetNewsWire this morning. Here we have the original text:

"To be honest, we’re not sure where half of this stuff comes from.  Maybe there’s a Japanese Willy Wonka churning out gadgets instead of candy. This somewhat puzzling looking device is actually a system that lets you change the channels on your TV by simply whistling.  Apparently, you attach the yellow piece to your remote then either whistle yourself or, if you can’t, blow into the included whistle and the device lights up and changes the channel.  Okay, we understand the lighting up part, but how exactly does this control your remote?"

And here's approximately how NNW rendered it when it noticed the changes:

"To be honest, we’re not sure where half of this stuff comes from.  Maybe there’s a Japanese Willy Wonka churning out gadgets instead of candy. This somewhat puzzling looking device is actually a system that lets helps you change find the channels on your TV lost remote simply by simply whistling.  Apparently, you attach the yellow piece to your remote then either either whistle whistle yourself or, if you can’t, blow into the included whistle and the device lights up and changes the makes a sound so you can find channel.  Okay, we understand the lighting up part, but how exactly does this control your remote?it. "

Kind of changes the meaning, doesn't it?

From what I've read, a lot of the more popular blog sites have been having terrible problems with comment spam. What's comment spam? It's where people generate large numbers of comments to blog entries. These entries contain URLs of the sites they're trying to promote. But not in hopes of people reading the comments and following the links, oh no. Their real target are Google and the other search engines. The theory, apparently, is that the more sites with links to the spammer's site, the more popular a search engine will believe the site to be. So it's all about getting higher up in Google.

My blogs haven't been the victim of comment spam, which I guess means they don't qualify as spamworthy. (Sad, isn't it?) But those that have are getting some potential relief, as Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others agree on a new tag that will identify links that search engines should ignore. By using rel="nofollow" on the links to comments, we're helping the search engines to distinguish between the blogger's content and stuff coming from visitors.

I've added the tag to the links to my comment pages both here and on my other blog, so anybody planning to spam me is wasting their time. And mine, since I'll still have to clean up the mess, but I'm sure the spammers don't care. If you run a blog and aren't using one of the big services like LiveJournal or Blogger, you might want to consider adding rel="nofollow" to the links to your comment pages. Just a thought.

No, not this entry; no spew warnings apply here. But if you follow my recommendation (and my link) and visit The Impulsive Buy, you would be well advised to finish whatever you're eating or drinking first. TIB is a product review site. Or maybe it's a comedy site. No, wait; you're both right! It's a comedy version of a product review site. Which is different than a comedy product review site, which one assumes would talk about whoopie cushions and fake vomit and the like. Not that I would put it past this blog; his review of Post Carb Well Golden Crunch Cereal has certain fake vomit allusions. Or should that be aspirations?

Anyway, my point, assuming I have one, is that the reviews here are both cautionary and hilarious. Makes you wonder why Consumer Reports never thought of that.

Since I've been running my blogs, I've been checking my access logs to discover how people come to visit me. And I've noticed regular visits with URLs like this: <http://www.xopy.com/friendslinks.php>. Since no such page exists, and since the site at www.xopy.com consists only of a cryptic "We'll be back" message, I decided a little investigation was in order.

Very little investigation. A Google search found the explanation, courtesy of Visual Intensity. It seems that the links I saw were part of yet another attempt to find candidates to spam. Their technique is to rely on site owners who are foolish enough to leave their access logs where other web spiders can find them. By embedding their URLs in an access log, they hope that other people will find and follow those links and discover whatever it is they do. And although xopy.com is down, they have a bunch of other aliases that one assumes are still active.

The fix, beyond making sure your logs are hidden from your web server (as mine are), is to prevent these slimebuckets from accessing your site. Visual Intensity includes a how to on their site. Remember: only you can prevent spam. Well, you and Hormel, of course.

I've been doing way too much blog surfing with BlogExplosion, both to find interesting blogs, at which I've been only mildly successful; and to increase traffic to my own blogs, probably a waste of time, since I assume most visitors leave after the 30 seconds required to get BlogExplosion credit. But I've noticed that a surprising number of BlogExplosion blogs use OLE or DirectX or some other evil Microsoft technology on their web pages, technology that I as a Macintosh user are prevented from viewing.

So whatever happened to the idea of "one site to rule them all", that web pages should display on everybody's browser? Do the owners of these sites care that they're locking Mac and Linux users out? Does it worry them that they're also putting their Windows readers at risk? Or do they figure that anybody silly enough to rely on Windows deserves what they get?

That last question was rhetorical, in case you couldn't tell.

The second biggest challenge to having a blog (after figuring out what to write about) is getting visitors. I've been pretty lucky in that regard, since the age of my larger website gets Google's attention. But anything that attracts more eyeballs is generally a good thing, right?

Enter BlogExplosion, a link exchange with a difference. Instead of swapping links between websites, a practice I've never cared for, BlogExplosion trades visitors. You use the site to visit members' blogs, either randomly, via banner ads or their blog directory. And for each two sites you visit, they bring a visitor to you. It's pretty well implemented. And if your blog is compelling, maybe a few people will come back on their own. Or better yet, add you to their RSS feeds. And if not, well, at least it's free. Remember free?

Okay, it's hardly front page news. And it's not even about this blog, where my posts outnumber my total readers by two to one. And that's without my having posted all that much. But it's a nice milestone to note that my iTunes blog has actually attracted a link from somewhere other than search engines and the blog directories I importuned to carry it. So thank you, Nat Pike. I appreciate the vote of confidence. Or the need to fill out the list of links on your homepage. Whichever.

I'd forgotten just how much fun surfing the web can be. Like today; I wandered over to Brad Sucks to listen to some of his music. And a blog entry caught my eye; called Fans Rule, it's a pointer to a piece by Scott Andrew, another musician and blogger. Scott writes about why having people appreciate him and his music is more important than worrying about getting every last penny from file swappers/swipers. Skimming through Scott's blog after reading that piece took me to Joe Gratz's site, which quotes an absolutely brilliant End User License Agreement from Virgin Digital. And a comment on that piece led me to the equally brilliant (if not quite so over the top) policy statement for Modern Humorist. Both of which make my own site's privacy statement look pitiful by comparison.

The website that surrounds this blog passed its ninth birthday a few weeks back. I had cause to think about that fact while I was working on my iTunes blog and trying to figure out how to get people to discover it. My site gets a fair number of hits, especially given its relatively static content. But that took both time and timing. The latter is because I discovered the Web at such an early stage, when Yahoo! was new and Google hadn't yet arrived on the scene. Getting listed in directories got some visitors. And having content about Java was enough to get lots of links, a surprising number of which persist to this day. And of course, the more people link to you, the more people want to link to you. And Google uses link popularity as one of their criteria for positioning a page in their search results.

Which leads to my initial efforts to get my other blog noticed. I put a couple of links to it in other places on my site. And then I found some blog directories and submitted my information. And waited for the hits to start rolling in. Interestingly, nearly all the hits it's had to date (as few as they are) have come from Google. Which shows how much things have changed. Back in the good old days, it could take weeks for Google to notice new content on a site and add it to their index. Now they absorb things in days if not hours. It also shows that web directories aren't the way to introduce a new blog, or at least that you need a more provocative topic than iTunes to stand out among all the other thousands of competitors for attention.

And that makes me wonder how long it'll be before anybody reads these words and how many other entries I'll write before I get an audience. Assuming one arrives in the fullness of time. Which reminds me of my father's favorite joke:

"If a man stands in a forest and his wife isn't there to hear him, is he still wrong?"

Well, it's funny the way he tells it.

Some things seem like a good idea at the time. Like creating a blog around a specific topic like favorite music. (That wasn't a hypothetical notion. It's over here.) But it doesn't take long before you think of other things to talk about that don't fit the structure of that first blog. So here comes blog number two, where I'll write about whatever seems interesting, whenever it occurs to me. Can't wait to see how often that happens...