Bloggery Madness

Aside

This backend of this blog is continuing its descent into madness. Following on from the problems where no posts would accept tags, this seems to have fixed itself while simultaneously stopping the blog posting anything but the most recent article on the home page. All of this has taken place without user intervention. It seems the glue, velco and staples holding the back end together have finally given up the ghost. Hopefully we will be able to find time this weekend to fix things. Sorry for any weirdness until then and during the “improvements.”

WordPress upgrade mildly broken

Bits keep falling off this blog like so many bits of newspaper escaping from the recycling van cage. (E.g. the Atheist blogroll became landfill months ago, although I see it still works fine on dozens of sites.)

After bowing to WordPress’s nagging requests and upgrading WordPress to version x (I can’t remember) two days ago, I find that I can’t attach tags to posts.

Any ideas?

Bloggery

Come back flatterspam, all is forgiven.

For the past few days, the blog has been getting gibberish comment-spam, in oddly large numbers, almost at DDOS attack levels. (OK, I exaggerate but there were over 380 yesterday, 51 today.) Some of these comment spams are particularly weird, in that even the URLs are gibberish.

It’s not as if the random word generators have generated text in any known human language, that could trick the unwary into clicking on a link to onlinefakemeds.com or whatever. The URLS themselves are also random letter collections, with names like Mr._Mxyzptlk but less meaningful.

Charitably assuming that spammers have not completely taken leave of their senses, I guess that these suidfiojdfolsrkl.comstyle links go to redirects and do eventually take the unwary URL-clicker somewhere. (Obviously, I’m not going to try them out. I’m enough of a sucker for any worm or trojan anyway.)

But still, what is the point? It seems even less likely that people would click on a gibberish link in a mound of gibberish than that they would believe that a complete stranger in Africa would pay them ten percent for the assistance in transferring 64 million dollars.

A few more blog-related odds and ends, now I’m on the subject:

Apologies to anyone who expects to get email alerts about new posts here. This plug-in has just stopped working. We don’t know what happened so we have less than no idea how to change it.

The Atheist blogroll got broken so long ago, it’s almost a distant memory. Again apologies. We threw it away a few months after it got stuck permanently showing last August’s posts of about ten blogroll members. (Or something like that.)

Other things just randomly break anyway. For instance, there was a link to the Convention on Modern Liberty that only lasted a week or so.

Plus, this blog can load so slowly (even on my allegedly very fast connection) that It’s hard to see why anyone bothers waiting for it.

Except for all those visitors who are looking for Schwarzenegger, 5 fruit and veg, funny magic the gathering cards, Bodium castle, fairytale castles, fine art or morris dancing. These are the top search terms that consistently bring people here from Google. Every day.

Now, I am all for giving the public what they want, but there’s only so much that I have to say on any of these topics. So, most of these visitors must leave a little disappointed, to put it mildly.

This blog needs a serious “REDO FROM START.” It should happen soon…..

If it ain’t broke

I have tried blogging platforms apart from WordPress and have found them too restrictive or unpleasant to use. I had a few stabs at helping a friend develop a “network of networks” on another platform (N**g) I was reduced to helpless gibbering, as its counter-intuitive interface actually sucked out my previously adequate knoweldge of html and css and replaced them with complete incomprehension. So, I am a diehard fan of WordPress. It doesn’t leave you stupider than before you start using it.

But, the new WordPress upgrade is annoying. For silly things, granted, but it’s still infuriating.

The old admin interface discreetly offered you lots of choices that you could ignore except once every few months. This one puts lots of items (that you don’t care about) in your face, as soon as you login.

Usually, I open this interface to post. For instance, I don’t much care who has linked to the blog, if those links are just spam pingbacks or from sites with a working Atheist Blogroll (which you will no longer find here, for reasons we can’t fathom.) If it’s a real link, I’ll find it anyway. WordPress news doesn’t really interest me much. If I want to read it, I’ll look at the WordPress site. And so on.

When I started using the new interface, there was a confusing Quick Draft window in the top right corner. Confusing because I didn’t know if this was the new Post window. In which case, it feels so cramped that I really don’t want to use it.

It made me wonder – will my drafts be “quick” enough to match some conceptual terms of use? My long drawn out blogging process : finger-pecking characters, writing drafts, rereading, typo-searching, changing my mind, rewriting whole paragraphs only to make them worse – and so on. It ain’t “quick.”

Maybe the interface will give you five minutes and post things, when you don’t expect it. (That happens often enough anyway, by accident.) That would be “quick.” Because, otherwise, it looks as if writing in the Quick Post window might turn out to be slower than using the old-fashioned and more generously-proportioned Post Window.

Faffing about nervously with that little rectangle, I spot Posts – Add New. This mercifully brings me to a window much more like the old one. But it still puts disconcerting things all over the screen.

For instance, “Excerpt”, which tells me that Excerpts are “optional hand-crafted summaries of your content.” So, something like an Abstract, then? It’s hard enough to write an Abstract for an academic piece. Why would anyone want to write an abstract of their blog post? To my recollection, academic Abstracts exist mainly so that hard-pressed post-graduate research students can use them for “I’ve read that”- bluffing purposes. Is anyone going to bluff reading a blog post?

Phew, at least writing an Abstract Excerpt is still “optional.” You won’t lose marks if you don’t bother. But you can “use them in your template.” (Why?) With a “template” link that I choose not to follow, to avoid getting sucked further into a WordPress shadow world, in which a blog exists to make use of WordPress capacities, instead of the other way round.

I love WordPress. It’s brilliant. I am a bit sad that it seems to be about to fall into the canal that separates “useful new features” from “bloatware.”

Function creep means that any software revision has to have lots of extra features, way beyond the point at which they serve any purpose except to distinguish the new version from the one before.

I understand why this has to be so for commercial programs. If Adobe doesn’t convince buyers that the new Photoshop has many more desirable functions than the last version, unemployed software writers will be streaming out of their factory saying “The dream is over,” (like the workforce of the Baby-Get-Well-Cards factory, in the Simpsons episode in which Homer swathed all the Springfield babies in PPE.)

WordPress though? Surely, WordPress is partly a labour of love and partly an opportunity fro shit-hot coders to show their brilliance. In which case, hiding the upgraded stuff in the background and leaving the old-fashioned interface intact would suit me better.

Blogspam that’s not funny

Idly deleting the blogspam in Akismet I see that this blog appears to have got spam from… itself.

admin | info@www.whydontyou.org.uk | whydontyou.org.uk | IP: 85.153.7.194
Your investigation have been helpfull for me. I wish everybody writes article as this.

WTF? Well, I suppose it’s always possible that I am suffering from a brain disease that makes me both send out spam at random and forget that I’ve sent it.

Plus removes any native-speaking familiarity with the English langauge.

Not to mention that it seems that I’ve been absent-mindedly visiting Turkey without realising it. Because this host is what that IP resolves to (assuming, for no good reason, that the originating IP isn’t spoofed)

Turkey
City: Istanbul
Latitude: 41.0186 Longitude: 28.9647
Host: barbaros.turkbilnet.com
IP: 85.153.7.194

This really pisses me off. If the spammers are so prolific that they’ve spammed the blog they were using as a pretend source, how many other blogs have got spams that seem to originate from here?

Does anyone have any suggestions about what to do about this?

Bless this blog

PCs’ demonic powers are self-evident to anyone who’s had to pay with their own blood for opening a case or for trying to get a cpu fan off its mount. So, it’s no surprise that there are religious ceremonies to propitiate the evil entities that haunt the average PC box. (h/t the Register)

There’s a Shinto shrine where you can get your PC blessed, according to iol.co.za

In high-tech Japan, not only programmers provide protection from viruses and other computer bugs, but also the gods.
At Tokyo’s Kanda-Myojin Shinto shrine, the faithful can bring their computer and have the priests use centuries-old ceremonies to ask the gods for help and protection for their computer, a shrine spokesperson said Friday.

Centuries old? Wow, if they protected 17th century PCs adequately, these are the ceremonies for me.

The site otakuinternational.com has a picture of laptops getting prayed over in the aforementioned Shinto shrine. Sadly, you have to go to Japan. They don’t do it over the internet, although I may have spotted a marketing opportunity there.

Among the traditional charms often found at a Shinto shrine, they offer a very unique one adorned with what looks like circuit boards and chips. You can even find one to bless your blog. I guess there is no such thing as too much protection!

Otakuinternational has a photo of what you need for blog protection.

From otakuinternational site converte dto jpg

From otakuinternational site converted to jpg

This may sound a bit pushy, o great and magic bloglord, but maybe you could see your way clear to sorting out the endless comments delay thing on this blog.

Toutatis knows I’ve poured enough coffee into the keyboard to slake the thirst of an army of vengeful spirits. And I am facing something that could easily be magnetic north, if only I had a compass.

*************
Aside

Someone called Chris, commenting on the Register piece, linked to a bbspot article about Bush supporting a faith-based firewalls from a couple of years ago. 🙂

Wittering on about blog spam again

This blog feels slightly shortchanged in the weird searches department. For example, if you look at HjHop’s site, he gets searches that are bizarre enough for him to make a funny feature of them.

Search engine choices that bring unsuspecting people here are generally just odd. Not entertaining, just odd. Normally, there are between 5 and 15 for Schwarzenegger (?) and similar numbers for pictures of guns. (??????) Sometimes, castles come top, usually Bodium castle – but there were only 7 searches for this today. Today’s search referrals also included Rorschach (?7) art and fine art, (?6) and (?5). 5 Fruit and veg is normally a front runner but came nowhere today. I defy anyone to make a readable post out of that lot.

I suspect noone has ever been directed by a search engine to what we fondly believe is the normal content of our posts.

But this blog could acquit itself well, if it ever gets in a competitive event relating to volumes of blogspam. According to WordPress stats for this blog, there have been 2,624 approved comments but

Akismet has protected your site from 13,409 spam comments already

Akismet doesn’t even cover the whole life span of the blog and it’s probably been reinstalled a couple of times – hence, reset to 0 – but even on these figures, that’s a good few times as many spam comments as there were legit ones.

There are clearly spam fashions. I quite admire the craftsmanship involved in the ones that have generic phrases designed to flatter you into allowing the comment through the filter:

Love your blog. I’ll bookmark it and return later.

or the old favourite from last year, with words to the effect that:

I didn’t quite understand what you said on [insert name of blog] but I’m interested to know more.

However, it’s as if the heart has gone out of the spammers. This week’s “new black” for spam seems to involve sending some random syllables, occasionally with a load of links:

qkncihdf tjnprcd mitqlanp oznqx eaqrpzu imfwatulo sjmxrqgh

for example. Or, what about this, where even the links don’t make an effort to disguise their innate spammishness, let alone entice the unwary with promises of free meds or unfeasible bodily expansion?

biprong unbrimming martinetism bosn amative biota spongida expectingly
ziafm wnwwqwuy
http://jdskmnffl.com
ktuhbdk info
http://jlvxkeva.com
uosgu wcmqjs
http://sgqwajre.com
kxrrd qzfkagqn

What’s going on? There are eleven of these in the Akismet spam queue today. Not one has an English word in it.

The Register had a long security post about blogspam, on Friday. The article was about a malware scam that claims to take the user to various legit sounding places.

Over the next several weeks I noticed a lot more of these, not only pointing to Google but also to Yahoo and MSN. The servers they pointed to all had the same basic structure, such as google-homepage.google-us.info, msn-us.info, yahoo-us.info, etc. Every one resolves to the same IP address: 124.217.253.8. That IP address is registered to Piradius.net in Singapore. The server appears to be hosted out of Kuala Lumpur. The domains, however, are registered in Ukraine:

(They’ve all moved since the article was written, of course.)

The rest of the article is fascinating. Click on one of these imaginary images and they run an executable. The article shows a series of legit looking screendumps, with the alerts very well designed. They put the fear of malware into you and offer you apparently Microsoft-approved solutions. There’s even a blag Microsoft Security Centre. The only intrinsic design flaw was that it said XP Security Centre, which was immediately suspicious to someone running Vista.

I’m as much of a mug as anyone. I just hope I haven’t fallen for any of these…….

One thing I’m pretty sure this blog been subject to (thanks to Firestats’ fund of fascinating information on referrers) is a hack of restricted WordPress content using the Google cache. It just involves asking for things from the cache by modifying the url request string. (I’ve done that by accident I suspect)

That password-protected site of yours – it ain’t
It’s one of the simplest hacks we’ve seen in a long time, and the more elite computer users have known about it for a while, but it’s still kinda cool and just a little bit unnerving: A hacker has revealed a way to use Google and other search engines to gain unauthorized access to password-protected content on a dizzying number of websites.

We don’t have any restricted or pay-per-view content,so no loss as far as this blog is concerned. But, it’s sort of blog-validating to be in there in a “dizzying number.” 🙂

Internet ratings

Another hat tip to podnosh blog for another “educational” scoop, yet again proving the Charity Commission to be out of touch with the reality of learning.
[KENYON’s FARM Free range eggs]
(Podnosh seems unselfishly willing to read the most turgid official publications or the FT, so the rest of us don’t have to. And to put the crucial bots of the content online, entertainingly)
[Muller Fruit corner blackberry and raspberry yoghurt]
The UK Culture Secretary, Andy Burnham, is more familiar with the internet than the Charity Commission are. However, in many ways, that’s a pity, because he sees the web as yet another opportunity to control the manifestations of “culture.” He thinks the internet is out of control so web sites should be subject to controls similar to those applying to broadcast media.
[tomatoes]
He told the Financial Times that there is a need to stop product placement on the internet and to put sex/violence ratings on content in You-tube videos.
[Lurpak butter]
As if these aren’t either ludicrous (suggestion 1) or heinous (suggestion 2) enough, he used the “governance” word….
[mushrooms]
….And he showed his sense of humour is at a culturally-dangerous low level, when he reported a child’s joke and completely missed the comedy.
[okra][onion]

You do have to stop and think when you read a quote from a nine-year old boy in Tanya’s report about whether we are sufficiently controlling this online world in which our children are roaming. It’s funny but it does make a very important point. He said: “I’m worried I’ll get lost on the internet and find I’ve suddenly got a job in the army or something.”

[Vegemite – not a patch on Marmite, btw]
He said “It made me laugh and I’m glad it made you laugh too but I think it makes an important point” which was that children really are worried about the internet….. I kid you not.

(Maybe, when he was child, he was too scared of the video to post slices of toast through the VHS cassette orifice.)

[The Village bakery – Polski chleb/Polish bread]
The wit of a primary school kid goes over the Culture Secretary’s head. He assumes the kid’s in genuine fear at some level, because he doesn’t really understand the nature of a “joke.” (This is the Culture Secretary, remember.)

So it’s not surprising that he doesn’t know that nothing boosts a site’s attractiveness to teenagers like over-18 content ratings.
[Brazil nuts]
This blog has been brought to you by everything I’ve eaten in the past 6 hours.

Comment spam up by 76% percent

I made up the number. Spurious statistics are so convincing.

Spam is definitely up though, as you know very well if you have a blog. If it weren’t for Akismet, this blog would be buried under the weight of it. A year or so ago, a few comment spams would be waiting in the Delete queue every couple of days. Now there are about 60 a day. And the buggers are growing in length. There are single spams with lists of keywords and links long enough to fill a few sides of A4. (Letter for those used to US paper sizes.)

Calculated across the whole lifetime of this blog, there have been 9 comment spams to every post. (That’s a real statistic. I didn’t just make it up, honest. I even used Calculator.) Given that Akismet wasn’t installed for a many months and that most of these spams have arrived in the past few months, the ratio of spam to post is currently very much higher.

My plan was to list the most ludicrous. But they aren’t even funny. They offer porn, online medicines, cars, loans, yada yada, yada. I imagine that even someone who is desperate to buy any of these would think twice about clicking on a link on a spam comment. In fact, is it even remotely possible that someone without an attested mental illness has ever clicked on one of these links in blogspam?

More sophisticated spams aim to pass a cursory blog-entry Turing test by using stock human phrases. Ofteb in a mechanical “translated-from-the-Finnish-using-Babelfish” way. E.g. two of this evening’s crop are “very true statement, we have gotten in much trouble on that notion historically.” and “Hi! Without taking into account the issue of establishing a stone by God, which he won’t be able to pick up, how do you think, may be something in this world, what can God never see?”

What? The characters come from the Western European standard characterset; the words are in an English dictionary; the sentences have nouns and verbs and punctuation – generally including a liberal use of the exclamation mark!!! But the phrases might as well be in a management report for all the sense they convey.

Some comments fake having read a blog post, with generic comments that could apply to any post – “Interesting post on *name of blog* today” – or claims that they haven’t quite understood what you were saying but want to know more. Well, they’re bots, ffs. Of course they haven’t understood your post. You were addressing a mammalian readership.

Others shamelessly flatter your writing style or your blog in general. (“Good portal!” “I like this work!”) The idea must be that the recipient is so blinded by recognition of their innate genius that they fail to notice it’s a spam and let the comment through. My head is at least as easily turned by dumb admiration as anyone’s, but even I have to pass this unsolicited admiration through reality filters.

In fact, these spams really annoy me because sometimes I do just want to comment on someone’s blog to say “Good post.” I’ve got nothing witty or pertinent to contribute. I just want to let the writer know I enjoyed it. But, the fact that it makes me seem like a comment spammer puts a stop to that.

A major irritation caused by spams is that we often accidentally delete real comments that have ended up in the spam pile. If you are commenting from an academic IP, it’s pretty certain that your institution’s email has been used to pour out spam, so Akismet is likely to block you. For a blogger, s it’s sometimes too much effort to pore through 40 comments on the offchance that one is a real person. So, real comments get thrown out, in a baby and bathwater scenario.

Comment spam costs pretty well nothing to create, so whatever the producers charge their customers must be pure profit. Bah. Some bugger is making money while you’re wasting your precious life-force deleting the latest missive from “daniel@msn.com” (a regular spam commenter whom we’ll probably all recognise).

Akismet does a fair job of dealing with it. I don’t know what other solution there is – or if it even matters as more than a stupid waste of bandwidth.

I obsessively look up the IPs and locations of the worst ones. Toutatis only knows why. (Most of the IPs will be spoofed anyway.) But I can glare at Riga or direct withering scorn at Hong Kong on Google Earth and feel that “I’ve got your number”. That must count for something…

Freedom of expression day

It’s “Freedom of Expression day”, organised by Reporters without borders.

To my shame, I don’t even understand how to take part in the cyber-demonstration, so I can’t really do that. But I’ll post a link to the Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents..

A few more blogs to read

Here’s another pile of blogs borrowed from Barefoot Bum’s list. Some of them are very good.

Cosmic Variance
Crazy Christian Chain Emails
Culture for all
Culture War Foot Soldier
Daily Atheist
DAILY BBG
Dark Christianity
Dark Matter, USA
Dark Side of Mars
darwinian remiix
Darwin’s Dagger
Daylight Atheism
Debunking Christianity
Deep Thoughts
Deeply Blasphemous
Desperately Seeking Ethics and Reason
Deutschland Uber Elvis
DEVOUT Atheist Godless Grief
Diary of a Teenage Atheist
Did a guy named Phil start Philosophy?
Die Eigenheit
Dikkii’s Diatribe
Dime a dozen
Disaffected and it Feels So Good
discernible chaos
Discussions in Existence
Disgusted Beyond Belief
Dispatches from the Culture Wars
do not read this blog
Dorset Humanists blog
DOUBTING FAITH?
Dr. Joan Bushwell’s Chimpanzee Refuge
Dragged From the Bottom
Drunken Tune
Dubito Ergo Sum
Duplicitous Primates
Dwindling In Unbelief

Was it something we said?

Our ranting has become notably less authoritative recently. (Odd, as I feel at least as authoritative as I have ever been. i.e. not at all.) And consistently less visible.

Maybe somebody has an explanation. The whole blogternet can’t have (slightly) broken, can it?

  • A week or so ago, I tried to post a comment on a student post on Pharyngula – to be told repeatedly, in the face of the evidence – that I needed to have a name and an email address. Checked. Yes they were definitely there. I copied and pasted. I rewrote them several times.

    The helpful message (I paraphrase here, and use leaden sarcasm while I’m doing it) said I was probably being blocked as spam, but that I could try enabling javascript or cookies or allowing/ deleting the science-blog cookies. Tried them all. My comment stayed unposted. It wasn’t a great loss to twenty-first century thought, to be honest. Still…

  • This blog has been leaking Technorati “authority” like an authority-leaking sieve. Over the past month, we’ve been dropping a few links a day, according to Technorati.

    One day, it was something like 40 down today from the previous day. I’m pretty certain I would have noticed three months ago, if the blog had suddenly accumulated 40 links in one day, . So how could we lose them all in one day?

    Oddly, firestats and feedburner show that blog hits are much higher than they were when we had twice the “authority”, three months ago.

  • We’ve been intermittently vanishing from the Atheist blogroll over the past few weeks. This now seems to have become a permanent affliction. I hovered over the blog’s name on an Atheist blogroll site that has a static list. It said the the last post was on Friday at 12:38. Well, no. There have been a good few posts since then.
  • When the blog has appeared on the blog roll, over the past few weeks, it has taken at least an hour to appear. If the posts are queued somewhere for an hour, where is that please? Because it doesn’t seem apply to other posts that just appear after they are posted.

    When we’ve looked at the time stamps of blogs that appear long before ours, we find they’ve been written later. And magically appeared without falling into some warp dimension on the way. Maybe it’s crossing the Atlantic then? No, that doesn’t work either. There are UK-based blogs that pop up seemingly almost as soon as they are posted.

    We were even testing an ongoing hypothesis that the blogroll would only display this blog name when there were another more recent three blogs to put ahead of it. We never managed to falsify this.

    However, being ungrateful at being consistently fourth started to seem a bit churlish when we vanished completely.

  • TW has tried pinging the blogroll, in various ways, without any effect. Pinging Technorati seems to have an effect, in that Technorati will usually list a post within a few minutes of a ping. Or even respond to the auto-ping function and find the blog posts, all by itself.

As a side-effect, an increasing proportion of visitors are coming directly from search engines. There is a fair amount of entertainment value in working out how some of these searches would have led to here, unless every other blog in the known world had already been taken straight to heaven in the Rapture.

Anyone with any ideas about what’s going on?

Memetics

We’ve been tagged by the excellent no more hornets blog with another meme. This time it is the Evolution” meme. I am tempted to say that whydontyou blog actually disproves Intelligent Design by its very nature, as it definitely seems to be the product of chance events.

It’s a pity that we don’t have visual records because the look of the blog has changed a good few times, losing visibility a good few times when we’ve tried to change the theme. We tried a few themes, altered them a bit and finally decided it would be better to have control over the appearance of the site. Hence, we’ve had to learn how to create WordPress themes in the meantime and have even released some into the wild. This has brought us a weird collection of blogs that carry our name in the “designed by” bit at the bottom, with most ironically, a number of religious and even fundamentalist blogs, as well as (I kid you not) a penis enlargement blog.

The very first post here basically said Welcome. The next post was a recommendation for a book on philiosophy. I see a bit of a theme starting there:

Throughout the book Jamie Whyte uses logic to expose the common fallacies
that surround us day to day – ranging from the false authority given to victims of tragedies through to sheer evasive lies from the rich and powerful.

TW’s next few posts are also pretty interesting, a lot more astronomy and tech-centred than they tend to be now. My own posts soon degenerated into whinges about search engines being rubbish, so I’ll draw a veil over them.

We were much slacker about blogging in 2006. Whole months passed without many posts. But then nobody ever commented except on Ajax or Linux posts and we had no idea if anyone else ever read the blog.

I know the meme wants 6 posts but I’d listed too few, so now I’m going to list too many. A few selected posts from the old ones are Atheist belief, Prove or disprove, Linux partial success Happy Easter

The earliest post that is still unaccountably getting hits every day is a couple of lines pointing to an online source for Viking names with a sister post about Anglo-Saxon kings’ names that never gets hits although it has some actual content of its own. A lesson there maybe.

Other unaccountably still-hit-daily posts are the ones on food, imaginary megaliths in Liverpool and our alltime favourite, How to defend religion because it got us called an “entertaining blog” on the Times (We were planning to get t-shirts made) and got so many hits it temporarily broke our server.

Throughout the rest of the 2006, the blog rambled along, with some good posts, some rubbish ones. Very early in the blog, TW started posting on some of themes that he’s stuck to – including rubbish shops, internet magazines and digital photography. On one post, showing a photo of the Mithraic Temple on Hadrian’s Wall, he made this blog’s possibly first reference to the Biblical rains that have become a feature of the UK in the past year or so.

There were also plenty of anti-religion, anti-ID-cards and anti-1984-in-the-21st-century posts. The anti-ID stuff is starting to feel increasingly like flogging the proverbial dead horse, as more and more civil liberties disappear down the pan, so I think we’ve eased up on that a bit – not through optimism that the issue is dead but through despair that anyone can prevent it.

From January 2007, we were on the Atheist Blogroll, courtesy of an invitation via the sainted Nullifidian. This started to bring in some actual regular commenters, who constantly put us to shame, almost always outdoing the post they are commenting on, with their wit and wisdom,. (Bastards.)

This inspired us to try to hold a comment week, in which we commented on everything we read and solicited comments from anyone who was willing. This worked out pretty well except for me, at least, having to interpret “comment on everything” I read as meaning comment on blogs I read that have an easy-to-submit-a-comment capacity. (Registering with a google username or registering to read someone’s blog don’t count as “easy” for me.) After a few abortive attempts to comment on blogs that I really enjoyed, I also realised that it’s very lame to just say “I really enjoyed this” or “good post” so I often didn’t. It’s much easier to comment when you strongly disagree, of course, but I did little of that either, not much caring to argue the toss with nutters.

We are supposed to tag another 6 blogs and, obviously naming already-tagged ones would be pointless. There’s a good chance that the tagged blogs won’t thank us either. And I can think of a good few more that I’d like to pick, but Ill stick with the first half-dozen that come to mind. So here goes.
Nullifidian
Atheist Perspective
X is ….
Atheist ethicist
Clioaudio
Black Sun Journal

You’ll thank me later

I am following the lead of Migrations blog and pasting the Atheist Blogroll.

Number 21 of 50 Signs you’re a blogaholic reminds me that, for a true blogaholic:

# You care more about what Technorati says about your authority than what your children do.

Given that Technorati treats the Atheist Blogroll as having no effect on ranking anymore – possibly because it usually appears in a sidebar or it uses a script or both – I decided to give everyone on Mojoey’s Atheist Blogroll a link (as Migrations did) and up everyone’s authority a tad:

Continue reading

DotNetty Ramblings

Well, it has been a while since I have ranted or raved about technological topics so this is a bit overdue. Fortunately this months .net magazine has managed to provide something of interest (although I think this was actually unintentional on their behalf).

Towards the end of the magazine they have a tendency to waste two – three pages on a normally pointless section called “Big Question.” In this, .net asks a selection of .net figureheads (such as people from Adobe, Actinic, ISPs, Nielsen//NetRatings etc., as well as people like Oxblood Ruffin) a question which gives them a lot of latitude to wax lyrical about all things internety.

This month, the question is “If you could remove one thing from the internet, what would it be?” Surprisingly there are several well thought out answers and most stay away from the pointlessly obvious ones like child porn and crime. For example, Chris Barling (Actinic) earns several WhyDontYou Karma Points for his response:

It would have to be any trace of Michael Winner. He gets over 74,000 hits on Google, so there’s lots to remove. he appears to have no redeeming qualities. A quick Google search for his image is even worse, particularly the Daily Mail photo of a swimming trunk clad Winner. There should be a law against it.

Seriously, what else needs to be said? The only way this could be improved is to remove all traces of Winner from everywhere in the universe. Well done Chris Barling of Actinic fame.

Anyway, this wouldn’t be a WhyDontYou rant if there weren’t some annoyingly odd comments to complain about. Let us take a look at this snippet from Steve Burnard (Adobe):

I would remove blogs, for the following reasons: They’re personal opinions, usually by people who are unqualified to have an objective opinion. They can be out of date, yet will still be referenced as valid.

Blimey. Now as this is a blog obviously I am going to strongly disagree with the nonsense Burnard is spouting here.

Sadly, he is echoing comments which I have heard over the last few weeks from a variety of media sources and, with a lot of caveats, I agree with part of the gist myself.

There is, in recent times, a strange public approach towards blogs and internet information (at least there is in the UK). Some people work on the principle that everything on a blog is 100% scientifically proven fact, while others fall in the exact opposite camp. Obviously both are off the mark by a long way. There are lazy journalists, there are lazy researchers and there are lazy commenters – all of whom will do a quick web search, find a blog which agrees with what ever point they are trying to make and then pass the blog off as if it is peer reviewed research resulting from a double blind study.

However, as Burnard points out, these blogs are actually personal opinion. The problem is not their existence but lazy and stupid people expecting more from them. I am somewhat intrigued as to how a person can not be qualified to have an “objective opinion” when they are writing a “personal opinion” blog. It strikes me that Burnard simply dislikes blogs and has tried to throw two arguments together in his dismissal of their value.

If I read a blog which talks about Stanislaw Lem (for example), this tells me more about how the author of the blog understands the person, what he has done and so on, rather than going to the Encyclopaedia Brittanica and hoping he has an entry. I do not expect every single detail to be 100% factually accurate (although I am disappointed if I find mistakes – not that I have found any in the Black Sun Journal post I mention) and I do not for one second expect editorial commentary to be impartial. I have yet to find any editorial content which is actually impartial.

As to this mysterious “objective opinion” – where does Burnard suggest we go for this? (He doesn’t make any suggestions in the article) None of the “traditional” media sources could ever hope to be considered “objective” in their coverage, especially when it comes to technology. Nearly ever piece I have ever seen on TV or in the print media turns out to be little more than a regurgitated press release, manufacturers / designers websites are no better. I have yet to see anything even hinting at being objective on the Adobe website.

With blogs you can often work out where their bias lies (if you see a penguin logo, you know MS products will get short shrift for example… 🙂 ), and the more you read the blog, the easier this becomes. While there is a risk of getting press-releases in blog forms, this too can be spotted by visiting the blog frequently. Other than the occasional high profile blogger who gets paid to comment on products, you can normally be reasonably sure that when a blog writes about a product, the manufacturer isn’t calling the shots.

What, I wonder, is the source of the mystical “objective opinion?”

One last odd comment on the “Big Question” is from Ian Pearson (slightly insane, high profile Futurologist with BT). Now, dismissing the frankly off the wall predictions he makes, this is what he thinks should be removed from the internet:

I’d remove holiday cottage agencies. The net doesn’t need them, I don’t need them, the cottage owners don’t need them and the tourist industry as a whole suffers greatly because of them. I and many other potential customers now go overseas instead, They’ve overstayed their welcome.

I get the feeling I am missing something here because this makes no sense to me at all. First off, this is a big bout of hubris by Mr Pearson. Just because “he” doesn’t need them doesn’t mean no one else needs them. I have used one to book a fantastic holiday to Hadrians Wall a few months ago and the cottage owners I have spoken to about them (admittedly only three) have had good things to say about them.

More importantly though, is the idea that the tourist industry is suffering because of online holiday cottage agencies. What madness. The idea that because of the existence of holiday cottage agencies people now decide to travel overseas instead is just too weird for words. Is Ian Pearson (and these mysterious “others”) incapable of booking a UK holiday without going through a cottage agency? Surely the final decider is the reality of economics. If these agencies really add no value, and do nothing but discourage tourists, they will go out of business and the weird happy state he seems to look for will return.

Personally, I just think all this “futureguessing” has sent him insane. (But this is just my non-objective, personal opinion…)

[tags]Technology, Blogs, Blogging, Steve Burnard, Chris Barling, Ian Pearson, BT, Adobe, Actinic, DotNet, .net, Magazine, Web Design, Web Design Magazine, Nonsense, Drivel, Rambling[/tags]