How Not To Blog ?

HTML has been so successful largely because it is extremely simple. You could say that without HTML, the internet would not be as powerful as it is today. A new language, called Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), promises to mirror the ease and utility of HTML and provide an entirely new internet experience.

SVG is an XML-based graphics file format and web language. (Adobe provides a good explanation.)

SVG offers higher graphic quality, is zoomable and far more interactive than XML, being based on live data. Not only that, it's easy to create SVG-based web pages or web elements. (That's the money shot.)

Search engine spiders will be crawling around SVG-based media. This is something that's currently difficult to do. Imagine Google being able to search graphics not based on what the file name of the graphic is but what makes up the graphic or media. (This echoes the pre-Google days of internet searching.)

Basically, SVG enables web graphics to change at the user's whim. SVG-based graphics would give consumers more choices because the consumer would control and could better-visualize the transaction they are making. Imagine going to Amazon or My Yahoo and, instead of just seeing personalized text you also saw personalized graphics. These are just some of the possibilities.

SVG will do for graphics what XML is currently doing for text, and much more.

SVG functionality will also be a part of the next version of Firefox (1.1, expected in June) and Opera.

Look for Google to work out a deal with Yahoo! in the next 2 weeks.

What am I, crazy? (Fundamentally, yes.)

A partnership will be monumental. It will be the biggest internet-related story since Netscape. Momentum... check! Enthusiasm and coverage... check! New technology via collaboration... check! It's the only way the next internet will be born on a mass scale (and thus, the only way either of them can survive the next 5-10 years).

Awesome.. here's one way to rid the world of lots of people. Kill 'em all!

The Pope's tomb will soon be open to tourists. Fuckers hold nothing sacred. If they're doing it the true Italian way, they will charge an admission fee. What else to do with a church that's quickly losing relevance in modern society? Milk it for what it's worth. Perhaps the next black Pope will bring the soul back to the church.

People are funny. Lexis/Nexis has enabled quasi-public access to their massive database of consumer names, addresses, telephone numbers, social security numbers, criminal records, and other juicy details for years. If you worked in a law office, accounting office, or any other office with access you could literally find out anything on anyone.

I have discovered that most people don't give a shit about much of anything. They have never learned how to use their brains. Sad.

Somebody is too damn lazy to fix "the lazyweb". Get off your ass and stop the horde of blank posts.

Yeah, but people are still too polite to take a shit while talking on the phone. Really, I'd rather hear a strange echo than listen to you breathing heavily, sweat dripping all down over the receiver.

Would Jackson please kill himself already? That's the story we're all waiting for.

Are they fucking suprised? Idiots. I'm actually hoping that one and the Lake Toba supervolcano will go off shortly. Perhaps then we'll all stop

Ok. So the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy sucks. So what? It's not your movie to begin with. Come up with your own damn work of art.

So now the bitch is a prolific Amazon affiliate. At least the books don't suck like the website. Funny, people still want to kiss his ass. Or, is it shock from being raped?

Where's my porn podcast? I wouldn't listen to any of it but it's the only way internet technologies will rapidly evolve - cause people are more enthusiastic about having an orgasm than improving the internet landscape for the sake of it. (Fucking web elitists.)

You actually read this shit? Do you expect me to wipe your ass and cook your dinner? Get off the fucking internet and go outside before they close it down! You don't want to be like these dumbfucks who think being on the web is an obligation. You'll still be cool if you don't know what's going on this very second.

March 26: HNTB mentions that Google is working out a deal with delicious.

March 29: The guy running delicious announces "outside investment" for the first time but doesn't mention specifics

April 10: The list of investors is revealed

Google either didn't end up investing in it or is hiding behind one of the investment partners just to spite HNTB. (Like they even give a fuck about my blog.) Either way, they lost out. I would have swallowed the thing whole.

However, the fact that Amazon is on the list is interesting.

Union Square Ventures leads the investment group, and the other members are Amazon.com, Marc Andreessen, BV Capital, Esther Dyson, Seth Goldstein, Josh Koppelman, Howard Morgan, Tim O'Reilly, and Bob Young.

Here's a post from SEO Book on how to spam blogs.

Folksonomic tags, I think, would be very useful augmenting (or in lieu of) blog topics. The image below is an illustration of such usage, using a few articles from this blog. It is simply a chain of tags that alows the reader to quickly determine the scope of the article where, previously, the title only provided, well, a title.

A title focuses on exactly what the piece is about. It rarely mentions all of the peripheral context of the piece and oftentimes doesn't tell you about other important parts of the article. And besides that, many titles are vague and off the mark. Even some of this blog's titles are just plain silly. How many readers am I missing out on because I thought of some stupid title? (Or just didn't use a tagchain for my title, garnering the appropriate amount of community interest for my post?)

Tags work best for long articles but would also work well for shorter ones. Shorter articles would requirer fewer tags, but it might prove that skimming a couple of tags is much quicker than skimming that short article to determine if there are any points of interest. This becomes more important when so many of us are becoming overwhelmed by trying to scan blogs and other sources of information for articles of interest. The number of interesting and relevant blogs will only increase in the future.

Your blog program would, of course, require a module to effectively use such a system. It may work like this:

Type your post as your normally would. When you submit your article, your program scans the article and determines which words (repeat words, words in a database, user-defined words, whatever) will be tags for the article. There is also room to add your own tags, but this process automates it for you. You then select which tags you want to use as tags by selecting the weight of the tag, on a scale from 1 to 10. Tags not given a weight will not be used.

You decide what each weight and tag should be - it's the folksonomic tag chain.

In the article, the tags are displayed alphabetically and according to the weight you have given to it (changes font size and perhaps color). Clicking on a tag in the chain will take you to a page that displays the appropriate tagged articles from your site and other sites (delicious, Technorati, etc.)

This method can also assist RSS aggregators in filtering articles for you. You could set your reader to display articles from X blog tagged with Yahoo with a weight of at least 6, for example. Or perhaps Technorati (or Yahoo, Google) could search for: "social networking"+4, Friendster+8, CEO+2. It's a bit like using +friendster as part of your search query, except that you can make certain words more important than others.

Another extension of this system (perhaps in the year 2020) would be to RSS-feed tagchains from other sites to your blog, making the tagchains truly folksonomic, and community-chosen. You might think, for example, that your article is about your trip to Peru but others have determined that the most amazing part of your article/post is the recipe for quinoa you posted (heck, that might not even be one of your tags).

People are so funny when they get angry at this blog (like the good folks at Threatwatch*) for being this blog.

The purpose of HowNotToBlog is to not think like other blogs, not blog like other blogs, and not make merry like other blogs. If you want just another blog there are plenty to choose from (8,436,170 by Technorati's count). If you're looking for someone to more or less agree with your position (or at least be modest if they don't) and rock the boat only rarely and slightly, then this is not the place to validate your existence. Anything else would, to me, be a waste of time.

I want to bust your system wide open, you passive biased keyboard-hugger. If you don't want to use your brain give it to someone who will. You should want to re-create your world, too, and introduce some chaos into the mix. Without chaos, there is no evolution. We'd all look the same and be cursed with millions of diseases, each. Unfortunately, your egos, cliques and protected communities get in the way of timely change - you all blog the same. Most bloggers are too busy kissing one-anothers' asses and being polite. I call it blog incest. You have too much invested in current methods to rapidly realize new ones. So, when you see something new and/or different you automatically group with the community mindset - if the communities in which you are involved are ignoring it then you are very likely to ignore it, too. It works for you, but where is the original thought?

I'd rather shit 100 times and have 2 rubies come out of my ass than just be constipated with no insight other than what other people are thinking. It's no wonder that this article was popular - because so many people agreed with it. It's gotten so bad that most people just assume that if you blog you are a white male around a certain age, living in the US or UK, who blogs the same as do they, would link to the same locations, and pretty much thinks along the same lines. The funny thing is, no one sees anything wrong with this. It's like television in the 1950's. It breeds the kind of environment that produced what my original post was about.

Many great and wonderful things are born out of chaos, the unexpected, and the simply different. I will continue to fuck things up where you refuse to because you're too damn comfortable.

If every blog were like this one, the blogosphere would surely be in bad shape. But if there were no blogs like this one, the same holds true.

*it's a good community blog that I read several times a day. That would make me a member of the Threadwatch community, by their definition. I'm sure, though, that they think that all of their readers share the same views. But they would never be able to see it this way, which is why no universes will be birthed under their watch.

grafedia: words written anywhere, then linked to images, video or sound files online.

The Grafedia site posts photos of hyperlink graffiti - written, drawn, painted, tatooed, or printed text that point the viewer to an internet location.

It's only a matter of time before systems like Semacode that allow you to take a picture of an image and automatically access the data contained in that image take off like wildfire. (See some of Semacode's potential uses.)

Threadwatch isn't the only one that should re-word a posting to avoid confusion (see next article below). The Observer has this article.

I must admit, I immediately thought that it was an article about Bush.

This article from the Internet Stock Blog talks about the back and forth competitve environment for email and other services between Yahoo and Google. It also mentions MSN's role in the arena. Some interesting tidbits in there.

Google has announced that Google searches can be faster on Firefox than on other browsers because Google instructs Firefox to download your top search result in advance.

Safari also has Google search built in, but Apple's market share may be too small for Google.

Is this fair?

Three considerable earthquakes off the coast of Indonesia within the past couple of days. 2 of them were strong and at exactly the same depth as the 8.7 that hit on March 28th.

Saturday, a 5.3, Sunday a 6.1 and a 6.3.

The IRIS seismic monitor also provides a nice view. Here's a list of recent earthquakes from IRIS.

Could this set off another massive earthquake, or even the world's largest super volcano, Lake Toba, which just happens to be on the site of the recent earthquakes? This recent news article says that it could.

...Cas said Toba last erupted 73,000 years ago in an event so massive that it altered the entire world's climate.

"The eruption released 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles) of ash and rock debris into the atmosphere, much of it as fine ash which blocked out solar radiation, kicking the world back into an ice age," he said.

The scientist said super volcanos represented the greatest potential hazard on earth, "the only greater threat being an asteroid impact from space"...

Further,

...Cas told Australian media Friday that Toba sits on a faultline running down the middle of Sumatra -- just where some seismologists say a third earthquake might strike following the 9.0 magnitude quake on December 26 and Monday's 8.7 temblor...

Here's where I add something funny like 'Couldn't it at least wait until Star Wars: Episode III comes out?' to lighten things up.

1. If the packaging doesn't mention that it's an illegal copy, then it's not. Really, pirate, what's the difference anyway?

2. Pirating is a social process. No one group or entity can take responsibility for it. The media companies are just as responsible as us pirates.

3. Pirates are self-organizing. Like our products, we can be in many places at the same time without diminishing our value.

4. As long as market forces are on our side there will be work for pirates. This is our mandate and is as good as any. The people have spoken, and they want cheap media.

5. A distribution network can't grow forever. Eventually, some parts of the network will die. Allowing those parts to expire, like retiring old ways of thinking, contributes to the vitality and evolution of the network. Here, the pirate also has the advantage.

6. Piratism can only die when the big media companies remove the barriers to pirating. Otherwise, pirates have no need to organize. Fortunately, this isn't going to happen.

7. Without technology, pirating would cease to exist. Excessive rigidity and formality regarding technology only serve to impede the consumer process and keep pirates busy.

8. There will always be a black market in film and music. Big media can either learn to profit from it, or exhaust themselves trying to fight it. Which leads us to our last law...

9. The survival rate of diverse, decentralized clans is higher than that of rigid, centralized clans. This also means that big media will die out before pirates do. After which time we'll just call ourselves something else.

Copyright 2005 HowNotToPirate

StumbleUpon is a potentially very useful browsing tool for internet discovery. As they explain:

StumbleUpon uses ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like-minded stumblers have liked. Unlike search engines or static directories, this allows for a true "democracy of the web" ? all SU members have a say as to whether a page should be passed on.

Services like these are wonderful. We need more kinds like this to help people filter out "other". I'm always thinking about how very immense and pervasive the internet will be in the near future. I don't even think we'll refer to it as the internet, but "space". Kind of like artifical light back in the day, except now it's intelligent and networked.

However, there's one big problem with how StumbleUpon determines whether or not a user would be interested in a website. After registering, they want you to pick out 500 or so topics so that they can group you in with others who more or less picked the same topics.

This isn't social network-thinking, if that's their intention. This is like the difference between a Match.com and a Friendster.com. In the former, I'm choosing the qualities I want out of a list you have given me. In the social network model, you are analyzing my unique social environment and then analyzing which unknown others I can connect to.

All StumbleUpon has to do is allow me to import my list of favorite websites / web locations (from Furl or delicious, even), look at others with similar bookmarks, and simply tell me what most others have that I don't (and then drill down that list). I could even do it manually, looking at the list of others' who share my bookmarks on delicious, but it would take too long.

Slate has an article about fake DVDs in China's bustling metropolis.

One of the expats at our table had amassed 200. Another, 400. All looked at me funny when I asked whether anyone had any moral or legal qualms about this. Later, in Beijing, when I asked the same question of a business-school professor, the head of a trade organization, and two CEOs?the sorts of serious people, who, in the U.S., might become apoplectic about, say, file-sharing?I saw the same quizzical look, with one of the CEOs adding that having to spend more than $2 for a DVD or $10 for Windows XP was an outrage. At Sasha's, the expats explained that buying real DVDs wasn't an option, especially for the Chinese, because real DVDs cost 10 times more and weren't even available. (The TV producer claimed she knew of a store that carried them, but the others disputed this.) Fake DVDs, moreover, often were real DVDs: The same factories that produced and shipped real ones during the day produced and shipped fake ones at night.

The writer also makes a point that I do in my previous article, Microsoft has a really good deal for Chinese poor, in that some of the damages from "lost sales" would never have been sales to begin with.

I guess I'm not the only one who loves pirated media.

Zniff (beta) seems like a very promising new concept in search.

What is does is aggregate the the 1.5 million or so bookmarks from users on its Spurl service, then provide searchers with results that Spurl thinks is most relevant. Or something like that.

It also allows you to view and compare results from Yahoo.

This is also an interesting method to deal with the increasing amount of spam in search results (hello, Google?). That is, until the spammers overwhelm the regular users.

I'm not the only one who thought about the increasing volume of RSS feeds.

Geeking with Greg writes "A relevance rank for news and weblogs"

There's an article over at Online Journalism Review that talks about Yahoo news' use of RSS.

It gets interesting towards the end in the "Taking RSS to the masses" section

"If you look at how we've integrated RSS into Yahoo News, we're not actually using those three letters very much," Gatz said. "So you look at it, and it says what would you like to add to your political news, here are some political blogs. Would you like to add CNN or MSNBC onto your news page? The fact that it happens in XML or RSS isn't the important thing. Most of the users don't want to have to figure that out."

Is Google really wasting so much time on 'cool projects' like RideFinder that are ultimately not useful?

Could the service be any more useless than it is? Sure, the concept is a workable one. But get it right. Don't just show me a small portion of available taxis. (There's no way that Chicago has only 100 or so taxis, all of them on the North side of town.) And it's impractical to show taxis in New York, so it shows shuttles. What about showing buses and trains, something even more useful than a few taxi locations? Heck, you could even show buses and trains in New York.

Google's sneaky advertising will get them in trouble. It can't be more than a few bucks they're getting from the taxi companies. If they're trying to develop something that the internet community actually needs, they're not succeeding. In a desperate attempt to outshine Yahoo, they've recently doubled storage capacity for their GMail service. They could easily outshine Yahoo or Hotmail even more by making GMail available to the general public, rather than just the web elite. (GMail turns 1 year old in April.) If they're keen on continuing to distance themselves from everyday people (such as Yahoo isn't), they could at least start to love RSS.

The other projects in Google Labs are at least worthy of some development. But to use PhD brainpower on how to best find a few taxis in Phoenix rather than how they're going to kick Yahoo's ass is plain stupid.

Try Undergoos to replace those worn-out drawers.

See the Yahoo! Search blog for more info

We're releasing a new index tonight. You should see a lot of new content in the index as well as fluctuations in the rankings of results from previous searches.

Thanks, Razvan Antonescu

Wow. Not only will they make money from donor donations, Terry Schiavo's parents will also fuck over donors by selling their personal data to a marketing company.

Talk about taking advantage of human kindness. Do they think these people had to give money to support a brain-dead humanoid and her plight? Middle America is such a sucker for a sob story. At least a dead pope is worth crying about, but crying over someone very few people cared about or knew existed a few months ago is pathetic.

I'm sure they'll get a million or so for "their story" to be made into a television show, if they haven't already.

Here's a quote from the New York Times:

Pamela Hennessy, an unpaid spokeswoman for the Schindlers, said she was initially appalled when she learned of the list's existence.

"It is possibly the most distasteful thing I have ever seen," Ms. Hennessy said. "Everybody is making a buck off of her."

They are worse than the lowlife scum who run the "Terry Schiavo Blog"

In continuance of the Jason Kottke saga*, today we find Elliot Back's analysis of just how lazy the dude has become.

The "now-a-full-time blogger" is actually posting less than he was when he was only a part-time blogger.

As I've been saying all along, folks, it's all a sham. Milk users' pocketbooks for his pathetic cause then introduce "friendly" advertising in a month or so after. Do people really expect him to "experiment" with blogging full time, surviving only on the kindness of user donations (which, by my calculations have added up to a little over $20,000 for this begging season - it'll be much less next season), and still being able to keep up with his Manhattan digs and life in one of the most expensive cities in the world?

*the blogger who quit his job to blog full time. See:

Kottke looks to BoingBoing for inspiration
The Kottke Saga part IX-573
Kottke's Begging Goes Corporate...slowly
Begging... I mean blogging

Oh, Flickr. I really want to love thee. But it's been nearly a week, and you haven't 'approved' my fckng account yet. I suppose now that you've been bought out you don't need to tend to very basic administrative tasks anymore. Do you really want me on your bad side, oh Fuckr? I can be a real pain in the ass, you know.

I had a feeling Alan Greenspan was full of shit.

"According to sources at the Fed, Greenspan even takes pleasure in his obfuscation. Sometimes he will return from one of his speeches before Congress and order a video of his testimony, marveling out loud as he watches: "What in the world does that mean?" Obstruction, then, is the name of the game.

I think I recall taking a leak with him at a party once. Dude's gotta be at least one of the richest persons in the world, if not the richest.