Webtropic

Don’t know how many people have noticed this:  the feed of Webmonkey tutorials is gone mad. Most of the articles lead to empty pages while some of them are really weird stuff. Like the following:

which, if you click upon, leads to a page like this:

Is this a hijacked feed or what?

I was working on a personal weekend project with Yahoo Pipes, when I took notice of this:

The most frequent feed source used with Yahoo Pipes is Adultfriendfinder. The tag ‘porn’  is not that much used though.

Clicking the link of the adulfriendfinder source leads to dozens of pipes, most of them of elementary functionality that simply  extract an element from the feed of the site.

To Yahoo‘s credit, most of them are also inactive but, still, they show up in the listing. If you click on one, most likely you will get:

My first click was not so harmless though: it took me to a feed that displayed something like a youtube video player, which, when clicked, redirected to web site that Firefox notified me it was blocked.

What a pity that such a wonderful mashup engine cannot find its way into more prominent use…

The more time I spend online (as if it were possible), the more little things can make me change course completely. It’s all about adding up.

Take Ars Technica, for instance. This is a blog I really appreciate. I mean really, really: no crap content, in depth knowledge and coverage, important issues. What else to ask for?

Yet, lately I stopped reading it. The reason being  an old irritation that has become unbearable: Ars Technica does not publish a full feed. Although they have always a good excerpt, in order to read the article you have to click, open (yet) another tab, go to their page,  wait to load and …what did I went there for?  Ah, yes,  .. read.

Why don’t I stay in their blog then and scan the new posts from there?

I can’t.

I read from Google Reader because I want all the visual noise to go away. And I don’t mean only the ads by this. I do NOT see the ads, even if they are there. My eye is trained to skip them.

I mean all the other stuff: header, sidebars, banners, buttons, colors etc.

Google Reader does me a great service by eliminating all these elements that are put there, supposedly, to be more of use to me.

The almost black and white, high contrast pages of Google Reader, is the closest to a printed book I can get. And, for this reason, the easiest to read.

Apart from the visual distractions of the web site, there is another reason: time!  These  precious few extra seconds for the one post, add up for the next and the next, and the next, ad (almost) infinitum.

Were it  for a single post, and  it wouldn’t be worth to mention.

But I am an avid reader. I read lots and lots of posts daily. Having to take one more action (go to this other tab etc) is too much.

And there is a third factor: time again. But not the time spent on reading. The time one has been repeating this process, day after day, month after month, year after year. The lengthier the  habit,  the less inconvenience one desires in the way.

Please, blog  owners: do not allienate your most faithful readers. It is not from them that you get the ad money anyway.

There’s been much a discussion lately about the value of having hordes of twitter followers, sparkled mainly by the Twitter‘s  Suggested Users List. Jason Calacanis came to the point to offer Twitter $250K to be  one of the top 20 Suggested Users for two years.

The argument is simple: the more followers you have,  the more people receive your message,  the more power you have to market you ideas, products, services, or even yourself.

This sounds like good old marketing. Is it, really?

My personal experience of twitter and all the other social media is that the social experience does not scale. You cannot actively follow more than a few dozens of people. You cannot subscribe and read more than a few hundred feeds. You cannot subscribe to hundreds of youtube channels and watch even half of them.

By actively following, I mean, paying attention regularly or even occasionally to the message  ‘broadcasted’. I will not delve into the territory of the entailing  ‘conversations‘  because  it is even less scalable.

It doesn’t take to0 much brains to agree to this observation. Even if you are paid to follow other people’s updates, there is only so much you can take and do.

So why people like Jason glorify a practice that can bring little back?

Because it can bring back more than a little but only if two conditions are met:

• 50% of twitter users follow only 10 people or so. If you happen to be  one of those they follow, their attention is guaranteed.
• Not all twitter users are equal. There are people that had a big audience before joining twitter, Calacanis being one of them.  And others that have a bigger audience, who  are not even active twitter users (:think Madonna) . These celebrities  will receive preferential treatment in people’s attention, even if they are crammed among hundreds of others.

Besides, there is little trick that lots of people play,  that adjusts their social experience to their  true capabilities: twitter clients like tweetdeck allow segmenting and  grouping those you follow. If out of the thousands you follow, you are indeed interested in just fifty, you only have to include these fifty in a special group and interact/follow only with them.

In this way, you can follow back without hesitation every single one who follows you, and ignore him for ever after that.

To summarize, a big crowd of followers is valuable if the crowd’s  attention is more or less guaranteed, and this applies only to those of your followers that follow a small number of people or were actively following before twitter.

And here starts the fallacy: actively seeking thousands of followers regardless of their profiles or regardless who you  are does not bring back any profit. It does only pollute the twitter experience with daily twitter spam, driving gradually people away from this medium.

You might argue back that the twitter growth does not concede  with my statement. I can only argue back that a tanker starts turning from the προς  and it takes quite a distance before the turn becomes observable.

Update 24/3/2009: Just saw a somewhat related post here.

Do you ever give  even a single  glimpse to twitter public timeline? For jaiku I won’t ask. The map thing in the first page, with the updates popping from every part of the world, is kinda cool to watch for 10 secs, but no more. Identi.ca? Nah!

So what is the use of the public timelines anyway?

I saw it today. Checked it with two different browsers (Firefox and Safari) in two different computers. Looked the same as the image below. Don’t know how long is it like this. The question is how long it will remain…

By major_clanger

Spam is the single most annoying thing of the internet. Being so widespread, it is no exaggeration to say  that it can bring the web to a halt. When it comes to email, this statement is as close to truth as it can get.

Needless to say that there is no truly efficient antispam technique. And the reason I write this post, is just to declare provocatively, we need none.

Let me explain: Most of the spam fighting efforts are focusing on blocking the spammer’s way. We care about not letting them send mail messages or bait trackbacks to our blogposts, to deter them from faking twitter followers or friendfeed commenters.

As every crime story lover knows, what betrays the murderer is the motive. When it comes to spam, if we exclude pure malice, the motive is always one: to advertise.  In the end of the spam trail, always lies a legitimate or semi-legitimate ‘business’, that wants to attract customers. And there is where the collective antispamming effort has to focus.  Fighting down those who benefit from spam, fights down the financing of spam, and therefore spam itself.

 This kind of approach to fighting spam entails three levels of envolvement. The individual’s level, the community’s level and the authorities level.

• The individual’s responsibility is to bring to the attention of the community the existence of a spammer.
• The community’s responsibility is to expose the benefiting party and create a negative publicity for it that counterweights the whatever benefits of spamming.
• The authorities’ responsibility is, first to pass legislation that makes such an activity illegal, and then, aided by the community reproach,  to crack it down with whatever means.

At least, for the authorities of the countries of the world, this would be a welcome new activity next to their favorite passtimes of chasing bit torrents, cracking down free speach, and wiretapping conversations.

This is not a how to blog, but, as it is still under construction, I will blog about all the little tricks I apply here, that might have some use for the rest of the wordpress.com folks.

Here is a little nice one.

Problem:

Readburner is a service that aggregates all blogposts shared in NewsGator Online, Google Reader and Netvibes.

By counting the number of shares, it creates a popularity list. In effect, this is a truly democratical social bookmarking system, without the hickups of Digg and its likes.

Readburner provides its users with some nice widgets in the form of little chicklets, that display essential statistical measures.

The chicklets come in three flavors:

• Item of a specific user (i.e. his share page) registed with Readburner.
• Items authored by someone.
• Items of a specific source (say, a blog with many authors).

Readburner provides some javascript code that allows anyone to generate the chicklets for his part.

Now, I wanted to put such a readburner chicklet in my sidebar, but I stumbled on the usual wordpress.com problem: no javascript allowed.

Solution:

Since javascript is not allowed, we have to find a way of displaying the chicklet through pure html.

Let’s see what a chicklet is composed of:

• an image (the colored rectangle of the chicklet)
• a number (the counted items)
• a link (the link to the relevant page in readburner)

As a matter of fact, the number is in the image, so we have to find just two things: the image url and the link url.

• User.

( The number here is my number from the google reader shared items url http://www.google.com/reader/shared/11232096483858520222.

You have to figure out yours, and replace this one):

The required urls are of the following type:

Image: http://readburner.com/fire/shares.gif?user=11232096483858520222

Link: http://readburner.com/u/11232096483858520222

and the actual html code should be:

<a href=”http://readburner.com/u/11232096483858520222″  target=”_blank” title=”">

<img src=”http://readburner.com/fire/shares.gif?user=11232096483858520222″ alt=”"/>

</a>

which produces:

• Author:

Image: http://readburner.com/fire/shares.gif?author=Nikos%20Anagnostou

Link: http://readburner.com/u/Nikos Anagnostou

and the actual html code should be:

<a href=”http://readburner.com/u/Nikos Anagnostou” target=”_blank” title=”">

<img src=”http://readburner.com/fire/shares.gif?author=Nikos%20Anagnostou” alt=”"/>

</a>

which produces:

• Source:

Image: http://readburner.com/fire/shares.gif?source=webtropic

Link: http://readburner.com/source/webtropic

and the actual html code should be:

<a href=”http://readburner.com/source/webtropic” target=”_blank” title=”">

<img src=”http://readburner.com/fire/shares.gif?source=webtropic” alt=”"/>

</a>

which produces:

To figure out the proper links for yourselves, first of course you have to add your shared items url in readburner. Then replace your name, blog name or user id in the above code and paste it in a text widget in wordpress.

As I said, I am using Google Reader. The other services might have some slight variations in the url schemes, I did not bother to check. Please do for yourselves.

Good luck and ..happy sharing!

Let me start by stating that I love wordpress. I love it as an open source project, as a blogging platform, as a business model (.com, that is) and as a community, in general.

I started working with WordPress in September 2006. By the February of 2007, I already wanted to migrate to my own hosted installation. I run one ever since but, yet, for this blog, I chose to return back to .com.

The hosted wordpress gives a lot of flexibility. The most important  capability you have in a hosted wordpress, one not found in wordpress.com blogs,  is that you can run javascript and flash for plugins, ads, widgets, or your own hacks.
The support for plugins is critical. There are  so many of them out there, I am sure someone   can make your wildest blog dreams come true.

The downside is that you have to take care of updating and upgrading, figure out how to deal with high traffic, malevolent attacks and lots of other things that keep a sys admin awake at night.
Ok, maybe I am exaggerating a bit, but, certainly, one has more work to do with a hosted wordpress.

When I decided to start this blog, I wanted to avoid this extra hassle. I have my greek blog to experiment with, it works fine, I am happy with it, but that’s about it. Doubling the hours I spend for sys admin tasks, won’t make me a better blogger.

So I turned back to wordpress.com and started looking for things that can ease the restrictions that the default offering entails. Here is what I found:

a. Themes
With wordpress.com you get a limited number of themes, most of them not to my taste, but with an extra 15$ per year you can buy the CSS upgrade. Having access to the css file, allows you to play a lot with a theme’s look and feel.

It is not a trivial task, but lots of people with a little guidance may utilize the option.  Most  will find it easy enough to change fonts and colors while, with a little bit of extra effort, some borders, paddings and margins can be tackled too.

A CSS guru,  playing with positioning, dimensions, background image properties etc,  can make the theme look entirely different from  the original. To learn CSS, you can start here.

b. Media
WordPress.com gives 3Gb of storage space per blog and, given the falling prices of storage,I predict  this is going to go up. Yet, this amount of storage suffices for one to live his whole life and never  ‘consuming’ it, provided he follows a clever media storing tactic : upload images and photos to the likes of flickr, picasa or imageshack. Upload videos and sound file to any video hosting site.
While wordpress.com supports only Youtube, Google Video and DailyMotion for the time being, there is one more extremely useful  option (still beta): vodpod.
comes in two flavors: as a firefox plugin (it didn’t work with FF3 though, till the time of writing) or as a simple bookmarklet.
With the vodpod  you can insert any video in the wordpress editor.  So, if you have lots of videos of your own, first choose a video hosting site, upload the videos there, and then with vodpod embed them in your posts. Check my post with the video of Matt and you will see that it is actually coming from blip.tv.

Saving media in external sites is a good practice anyway. Avoids single point of failure. If I choose to export the blog and transfer it elsewhere, the media links will work immediately without having to move a single file.

c. Feed
Now, this is a tricky one. Most bloggers would like to have a feedburner chicklet to display their feed subscribers. Provided they have a feed ‘burned’ in feedburner, this is perfectly feasible with wordpress.com: you can copy the chicklet code in one of the text widgets provided and it will work nicely.
The problem is that, in this way, you do not actually redirect your feed to feedburner. Two feeds exist seperately: the default one, and the one constructed by feedburner, which meanr that there are two different feed urls also.
To have a unified feed would require an plugin such as  that one is not allowed to install. Remember? No plugins can be installed by users in wordpress.com blogs.

This means that your standard wordpress feed address is still there for people to use and will ‘lurk’  underneath the feed icon in the address area or a toolbar.
Those subscribed to the standard wordpress feed will not show in the feedburner chicklet.
There are no technical means to remedy this (not to my knowledge, at least) but one can apply some psychological techniques: use a feed icon of your own (same process as the chicklet above) and place it as close to the top of the page as possible. Grab the attention of the visitor. You can perfom a heatmap test to check whether your feed icon is visible enough. Use feng-gui to produce a heatmap. Here is an example of mine.

That’s about it.  Tell me whether you found it useful.